Microsoft is excited to announce that the Teams for Education app is being re-designed on a foundation of speed, performance, and flexibility, and has now launched as the next evolution of Microsoft Teams—new Microsoft Teams for Education.

To ensure Teams continues to meet the evolving requirements of educational institutions, here’s a quick look of what you can expect from new Teams:

  • 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 content security policies (CSP), and integration with MSIX (Windows app package format).

New Microsoft Teams for Education is now available on Windows and Mac desktop only. Availability for Edge and Chrome desktops will be announced later this year, and additional browser platform availability will be announced in early 2024.

For more details about new Teams, visit New Microsoft Teams is now generally available on windows and Mac.

Get started with new Teams today

Upgrading to new Teams is quick and seamless—no migration is required. You’ll be able to pick up where you left off after upgrading to new Teams. Along with our latest innovations in speed, performance, flexibility, and intelligence in new Teams, almost all classic Teams features are already available as a part of the new Teams platform. We encourage you to upgrade to new Teams today.

To learn more about these features and how to opt-in to upgrade to new Teams, check out the new Teams microsite or refer to The new Microsoft Teams desktop client documentation on Microsoft Learn.

Students sitting at desks in a school classroom and working on laptops.

Upgrading to new Teams is quick and seamless—no migration is required.

Important Timelines

From January 2024 onwards, Microsoft will be setting “New Teams as default” for all Education users. Key dates include:

  1. 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.
  2. March 2024: All new features and enhancements—and there will be quite a few lined up—will be available exclusively as a part of new Teams. To ensure our users can take advantage of the latest Teams innovation, all remaining classic Teams users will be automatically upgraded to new Teams after March 31, 2024.

We recommend that you upgrade your school to new Teams early in January 2024, as upgrading to new Teams is easy and seamless. Upgrading in early January will also ensure that there won't be any disruption to your classes in the middle of the semester.

Microsoft will continue to share additional information and instructions as we approach these respective timelines. We’re committed to helping you create a more supportive, dynamic, and interactive learning experience for educators and students with Microsoft Teams for Education.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on October 5, 2023, and was updated on November 2, 2023 to include accurate dates under “Important Timelines.”