Chandra Chivukula, Vice President, Engineering Microsoft Teams

Prefer audio?

Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, Teams admins and UC architects who want to understand why the new Teams client was rebuilt, how Microsoft's ring and TAP release process actually works, and what the shared code base means for feature parity across Windows, Mac, mobile, Teams Rooms and Surface Hub.

Guest: Chandra Chivukula — Vice President, Engineering, Microsoft

Chandra Chivukula, Vice President of Engineering for Microsoft Teams, has been on the Teams engineering team since before the product had a single customer. He talks Tom through the original Angular/Electron architecture bet, the shift to React and WebView2, how the migration of 320 million-plus users to the new client was actually run, and what the shared code base now unlocks across desktop, rooms, mobile and consumer.

Many thanks to Landis Technologies, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• The classic-to-new client move was driven by two things: adopting React in place of Angular and swapping Electron for WebView2, plus resetting the architectural baseline for the next seven to ten years of features. The headline user benefit quoted is roughly twice the performance with half the memory. ▶ 9:12
• The Angular-to-React conversion was deliberately done without a big-bang rewrite — core components were built in both frameworks in parallel so there was no hard break across multiple semesters, and only then was the native shell switched to WebView2. ▶ 8:11
• Teams went to preview in October 2016 and GA in March 2017 on a hybrid web app architecture, with Electron chosen specifically to sim-ship Windows and Mac; mobile deliberately stayed native (Java/Kotlin on Android, Objective-C/Swift on iOS). ▶ 7:11
• Rollout mechanics practitioners should know: internal rings get pre-release bits, feature flags and binaries daily; the first external audience is the TAP (Technology Adoption Program) ring of tech-savvy customers, who shape the product and shake out reliability issues before GA. This is standard for every build across desktop, web and mobile. ▶ 10:14
• For the migration, Microsoft built purpose-made policies so tenant admins could choose who moved and when. Where admins handed control back to Microsoft, migration was progressed tenant by tenant against telemetry, pausing and working with the customer whenever a new-client-specific hotspot appeared. Over 97% of classic Teams users have now moved. ▶ 12:18
• The same React/WebView2 code base now ships on Windows, Mac, Teams Rooms devices and Surface Hub, which is why innovations land simultaneously across form factors and why the UI stays consistent. ▶ 14:21
• Project 'Reflow' (announced at Ignite) makes the app responsive to the window it is in and makes panes resizable — chat list, in-meeting chat and the right-hand Copilot pane. Those regions were previously fixed; making them expandable is explicitly the groundwork for richer AI and app experiences inside them. ▶ 15:51
• Deeper OS integration is coming to the Windows and Mac clients — Teams already lays out cleanly into macOS Sequoia's predetermined window sizes — and iPad has had its biggest update in years, with multi-window (chat alongside a full-screen meeting) available to TAP users, positioned as a near-desktop replacement for executives moving meeting to meeting. ▶ 18:23
• The converged client removes the two-icon confusion from the Windows 11 built-in consumer app: one code base now handles consumer, commercial and Gov clouds, adapting its feature set per account, with containerised privacy/security and cross-tenant chat, call and meeting notifications for multi-tenant power users. ▶ 25:00

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

Listen: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Other platforms