Microsoft Teams now available free ... at last
It’s taken Microsoft some time but their collaboration service Teams is now available for free to all comers.
The popular collaboration service, Slack, built its business on their free offering. Many businesses adopted Slack after discovering their staff had setup Slack groups of their own. A lot of short term projects, startups, etc use Slack from day one. Film and TV shoots rely on Slack.
It was inevitable that Microsoft would offer their Slack rival, Teams, more openly. The small surprise is how long they’ve taken.
The free version is limited but not as much as you might expect. If Microsoft wants to get paying customers for Teams, they need to offer more than Slack.
The free version of Teams has:
- support for up to 300 people
- 2GB of personal storage for each member
- 10GB team file storage
- Guest access
- unlimited chat messages
- unlimited search
- built-in audio and video calling for groups
- unlimited app integrations
- integration with Office mobile apps only.
- 40 different languages supported
Teams integration with the Office desktop programs is only available to paid customers.
How to start free Teams
Login to your Microsoft account then go to https://office.com/teamsfree enter your email address and click Sign up for free.
If you qualify, you’ll be immediately taken to a setup page.
Not everyone qualifies for immediate access, according to some reasoning known only to Microsoft. Depending (apparently) on your email address, you might be taken to the Teams opening page but you can’t do anything until you get an authorization email.