Last month, Microsoft announced that they will be rolling out a personal “version” of Microsoft Teams so you can use it not just for your company or for work-related things but also for friends and family things. Almost a month later, we’re finally seeing this in preview and while you don’t have to download a separate app, you do need to have a personal account in order to see what else Teams can offer you as you try to keep in touch digitally with your loved ones.
Within the Microsoft Teams app, you can now log into your personal account and see what features are being highlighted as it will be more useful for your personal life. You can easily switch between your work Teams and your personal Teams and have the same functionalities that are just designed differently. For example, Chats is highlighted but according to Android Central, they’re more like your usual messaging apps instead of the thread-like professional-looking version on your work Teams.
You will see a dashboard where you can easily search through conversations, files, and people, see all your notifications in Activity, check your schedule in Calendar, keep track of files that you can share and access, and find more additional features. You can do things like start a video chat one-on-one or with a group, sync your multiple calendars, activities, tasks, chats, and even share locations with trusted family members or friends.
You also get a “Safe” where you can keep important things like passwords, login information, rewards numbers, etc. So it’s basically like a digital safe where you can share and keep all these with trusted individuals. As for chats, you get all the GIFs, photos, videos, documents are already integrated along with the text, chat, video and voice calls. Since this is still in preview, some things might change when it eventually rolls out in the stable version.
For now, Microsoft is not requiring you to have a Microsoft 365 subscription to use the personal version of Teams. But since they said “at this time”, this might also mean you’ll be required to have a paid subscription eventually.
