Presence in Microsoft Teams now updates in near real-time

Microsoft Teams, the unified communication and collaboration platform for Office 365 customers, is getting a bit smarter this month. Indeed, Microsoft has released a new Real Time Presence feature that should help improve online presence indicators in Microsoft Teams. According to Microsoft’s UserVoice forum, the company has introduced a new subscription-based model to provide real-time presence updates in Teams.

The presence of Teams users has switched to a subscription based model that brings near real time updates! Most of the time we expect presence updates to be reflected in a matter of a few seconds. It’s true for all scenarios like user’s calendar update, the Teams app status, or what the user decides to set manually.

The online presence indicators have been a fundamental part of the app on the desktop, the web, iOS, and Android since launch, and it tracks users’ presence status over time and makes that presence status available to their colleagues. The presence indicators can either be set explicitly by the user, and it can also change automatically based on the user’s activities (like joining an online meeting). However, the feature has suffered from an issue where presence updates were not reflected in real-time, and it could take up to 5 minutes for these changes to show, but this should change now.

The Real Time Presence in Teams has been designed to eliminate the delay and users will now get a clear picture of what others are doing in real-time. There are no special requirements to use this feature, and the change has been enabled from the backend for all users. Do you think that the online presence changes in Microsoft Teams are happening more smoothly now? Sound off in the comments section below.