Now there’s a new and different way to get paid Teams called Teams Essentials.
Teams Essentials is a standalone Teams offering, not bundled into any other Microsoft 365 plan. That’s what makes it different from other ways to get a paid version of Teams.
It costs US$48 a year per user. Microsoft promotes it as “$4 per month” but it’s charged on an annual basis.
What’s in Team Essentials?
On top of Teams Free (see below), Essentials users get:
- Unlimited group meetings up to 30 hours
- Up to 300 participants per meeting
- 10 GB of cloud storage per user
- Phone and web support
Microsoft 365 Family and Personal users already get the Essentials extras but only for personal use.
Teams Essentials seems aimed at small businesses who want to add staff into the Teams collaboration system without the cost of full Office. Teams includes editing/viewing of Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents inside the app or using the browser based versions of the Office apps.
- Microsoft’s announcement of Teams Essentials is long on hype and listing of existing Teams features. The above list is from Microsoft’s own summary of what’s actually extra in Essentials.
Teams Free limits and features
The free version of Teams, available to all get:
- Unlimited group meetings for up to 60 minutes
- Up to 100 participants per meeting
- 5 GB of cloud storage per user
- Unlimited chat with coworkers and customers
- File sharing, tasks, and polling
- Data encryption for meetings, chats, calls, and files
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