Microsoft Teams has been a vital application for many organisations in the past few years. Due to a lot of staff working from home MS Teams has been instrumental in organising online meetings and collaboration. MS Teams is free for everyone to download. However Microsoft has now introduced MS Teams Essentials for small businesses which comes with extra features.
MS Teams essentials
Small businesses can now use Microsoft Teams Essentials. Through the new paid service, small businesses can mainly use the core meeting functions of Teams and additional functions. A subscription to Microsoft 365 is no longer required.
A subscription to Teams Essentials will cost around £3 per user per month. This allows companies to organise virtual meetings in which up to three hundred people can participate at the same time. The maximum duration is thirty hours. Essentials users will receive 10 GB of cloud storage per participant.
That’s a lot more functionality than the free version, which small businesses now often use. This allows up to 100 participants to hold virtual meetings for an hour. In this free version, you get five GB of cloud storage per user as standard.
In addition, Teams Essentials only offers access to virtual meeting features, while previously they had to rely on either the free version or one of the corporate Microsoft 365 subscriptions. In addition to the Teams facilities, they also have web versions of various Office apps such as Word and Excel. You also have access to business e-mail boxes.
MS Teams Essentials compared to free version
Microsoft Teams free version offers you:
- Group meetings for up to 60 minutes, limited to 100 participants
- Direct user to user calls, limited to 60 minutes per call
- Up to 100 participants per meeting
- 5 GB of cloud storage per user
- Chat
- File sharing, tasks, and polling
- Support is self-help online and forum
Microsoft Teams Essentials includes everything what is included in MS Teams free and also offers:
- group meetings for up to 30 hours
- Up to 300 participants per meeting
- Up to 30-hour time limit on any single user to user call (so effectively no limit)
- 10 GB of cloud storage per user
- Anytime phone and web support
MS Teams essentials offers a great solution for small and medium sized businesses that do not want to commit to a full subscription of Microsoft 365 but still want to use all the functionality of MS Teams.
Tech-Wales IT Services
At Tech-Wales we pride ourselves providing excellent Business IT Support combined with our business computer services. We can help you with integration of MS Teams or Microsoft 365 to offer your organisation more flexibility. We have fully trained and customer focused technicians who will make sure that your IT network is always working for you. We provide pay as you go and monthly IT support packages for your business and can help you if you are having any issues with software packages. Feel free to contact us to discuss.