Microsoft has announced that personal features in Microsoft Teams are now generally available. Teams for consumers, as it was referred to back then, was first announced in March of 2020, and it"s all about bringing the same general capabilities of Teams to general users, including chat, video calls, and organization tools.
Teams supports meetings with up to 100 people (though for now you can take that up to 300 in light of the ongoing pandemic), and even for personal users, you can use Together Mode, which puts everyone on a call in the same virtual room. Microsoft says this helps reduce fatigue, and you can choose from a variety of settings to have the meeting in. You can also invite people to join a meeting even if they don"t have Teams.
Another big aspect of Teams is the ability to organize and coordinate with others. Once you"ve set up a group chat (or even a 1:1 conversation), you can create shared to-do lists and assign tasks to specific members. You can create tasks from a message in the chat, you can create polls to make decisions, and more. Every chat also has a dashboard that brings together the most important information like events, photos, files, tasks, and so on.
One more potential benefit to Teams is that you can use a single app for both your personal life and work. If you"re already using Teams at work, you can add a personal account by clicking the profile picture at the top, and switch between profiles as needed.
If you"re interested, you can download Teams for free here. It"s available for Windows, iOS, Android, and on the web.