hi everyone kevin here today we are going to take a first look at microsoft teams integration directly into windows 11 and this is brand new functionality so what is microsoft teams teams allows you to meet and chat with friends and family because hey there’s nothing like coming together as a family and being a cohesive team it seems like microsoft teams has taken workplaces and schools by storm the one area they haven’t been able to crack though is the consumer space in the consumer space you have whatsapp messenger facetime but there’s no mention of teams or even for that matter skype now microsoft hopes to change that by integrating teams directly into windows and awkwardly enough you never hear about skype anymore teams is meant to be the skype replacement now even without windows 11 you can already get microsoft teams you can get it on ios android windows mac and linux basically all the major platforms all right let’s check it out there is now a new default icon included on the windows 11 taskbar and there’s the new teams icon it uses the purple brand color and i’ve got to give props to microsoft this is probably one of the most self-explanatory icons that i’ve ever seen when you look at it you know exactly what the app does it’s a chat app and it also supports voice and video calling so good job microsoft to launch microsoft teams simply click on the icon on the taskbar or for all of you shortcut key lovers out there i’m definitely one of them you can press the windows logo key together with the c key c as in chat next up you’ll see a get started screen once you click on get started it’ll prompt you to sign in with one of your accounts and this is where the first big surprise was you can only sign in using a consumer microsoft account if you have a work or school account you have to continue using the heavier weight microsoft teams client i was really hoping you could sign in with any account and that way you could experience the integration with windows but once again this is only for consumer at least currently i don’t know if that’s going to change but that’s how it’s set up right now once you sign into microsoft teams at the very top you’ll see a button that says new chat and when you click on that you can kick off a new conversation you simply type in someone’s name their email address or their phone number if they don’t have microsoft teams it’ll automatically send out an invitation to them to get microsoft teams and then you can carry on your conversation because they’ve now joined the team back on the main screen you’ll see a list of all of your recent conversations and when you click on one of them that’ll pop out a chat where you can then carry on your conversation within the chat itself you have access to a whole host of tools that allow you to make your conversation extra special you have access to rich text formatting you can attach photos maybe you want to include that picture of the cookie that you baked last night i’m hoping that it’s good but not that good we don’t want more competition in the cookie space you could also include emojis and they have two different cookie emojis you have fortune cookies and then what looks like a generic chocolate chip cookie and you could even include giffies as part of your conversation back on the main screen when you hover over all of your recent conversations you’ll see that you also have the ability to make voice and video calls but when you hover over you’ll see some text that says coming soon so if i had to redesign the team’s logo it would be a purple chat icon and that would be it you wouldn’t have the video camera icon now to be totally fair once again this is pre-release and we get to preview what it looks like and we can provide feedback when it’s eventually released to the public all of this functionality will be there at the very bottom you’ll see that you can also open up the full-blown microsoft teams experience and when you click on that that opens up the team’s app if you’ve ever used microsoft teams at work or school before this probably looks somewhat familiar but maybe a little bit more stripped down it’s kind of like if you parked microsoft teams overnight in a bad neighborhood this is what you would be left with in the morning you just have a few things missing up in the top left hand corner you have your activity this is where you see things like at mentions or maybe someone reacted to one of your messages you’ll see that here as well if you start getting a lot of activity you can also click on the ellipsis and you can filter down your activity to the ones that you care about next up you have the chats tab and when you click on that you’ll once again see all of your chats but this view has even more functionality compared to the pop out chat view that we looked at earlier with your conversations you can organize them when you click on the ellipsis you can pin a conversation or you could just hide a conversation maybe some of your friends just aren’t as passionate about cookies as you are in which case you could simply hide that conversation within the chat view itself you have a few different tabs up on top you have your chat tab and then you also have a photos tab when you click on that that’ll show you all of the photos from your conversation so you could very quickly see all of the cookie photos that you shared back and forth and you could also add additional tabs when you click on that currently you can add a task tab so this way you can have a shared task list and i’m sure coming in the future microsoft will make even more tab types available for example they’ll probably be ones for polls maybe you want to run a poll with some of your friends i’m sure you’ll be able to pin a website and i’m sure the list will grow over time next up on the left hand side we have the calendar tab and when you click on that what do you know it opens up a calendar this calendar is automatically synced with your outlook calendar so any events that you have in outlook also show up here and vice versa up in the top right hand corner you can click on new meeting and you can add a new event now one of the downsides that i saw here is you can’t invite people while you’re creating the event instead you have to create the event then you save it and then you can share a link with others i don’t know maybe via chat but once again this is a preview so hopefully these types of flows get improved before the general release all right well that was a first look at teams integration into windows 11. i think microsoft really has a big opportunity here to have a winner in the consumer messaging space but once again it’s a highly competitive space with players like whatsapp messenger facetime let me know what you think down below in the comments do you think this app will be used a lot do you see yourself personally using it if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing and i’ll see you next time [Music] you