The new Microsoft Teams for Education app launches for Windows and Mac

Along with today's reveal that the new Microsoft Teams app for Windows and Mac has now officially launched, the company has also made the new Microsoft Teams for Education app available for the same platforms.

In a blog post, Microsoft outlined the features of the new Teams for Education app:

• Higher overall performance with enhancements in core areas such as reliability, security, and IT management
• Seamless collaboration across multiple organizations or accounts, ensuring no disruption to your workflow
• More reliable, improved security and better manageability – using trusted types, stringent CSPs, and integration with MSIX

Currently, the new Teams for Education app is available for school IT admins as an opt-in upgrade. This will allow those admins to set up their own upgrade schedule.

The announcement about the new Teams for Education app launch also has some reveals about the timeline for other platforms to get the new Teams app. Microsoft says that the date for when the new Teams app will be available for its own Edge browser, along with Google's Chrome browser, will be revealed sometime before the end of 2023. More browser support will be revealed sometime in 2024.

Microsoft also added some additional info for school IT admins about when they can expect to see the new Teams for Education become the default version of the Teams app:

• Early January 2024 – For tenants and users still using classic Teams, Microsoft will set new Teams as the default Teams client. Administrators will still have the option to set classic Teams for their users via policy, should they choose to upgrade their users to new Teams on a different schedule.
• Early June 2024 – All new features and enhancements will be available exclusively as a part of new Teams. To ensure our users can take advantage of latest Teams innovation, all remaining classic Teams users will be automatically upgraded to new Teams at this time.

Overall, it looks like Microsoft is giving schools and other education customers a lot of time to get used to the new Teams before it makes it the full replacement for Classic Teams.