Tom Talks Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 news and opinions

Microsoft Teams Free Version, What’s included, What’s not?

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200,000 businesses across 181 markets now use Microsoft Teams. To drive further adoption and further compete with solutions like slack that have a popular free tier, today Microsoft added a free version to Teams.

The free version includes the following for up to 300 people:

  • Unlimited chat messages and search.
  • Built-in audio and video calling for individuals, groups, and full team meetups (VoIP no PSTN)
  • 10 GB of team file storage plus an additional 2 GB per person for personal storage.
  • Integrated, real-time content creation with Office Online apps, including built-in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
  • Unlimited app integrations with 140+ business apps to choose from—including Adobe, Evernote, and Trello.
  • Ability to communicate and collaborate with anyone inside or outside your organization, backed by Microsoft’s secure, global infrastructure.

What costs Extra/requires an Office 365 paid account?

  • The full Office 365 suite
  • OneDrive, SharePoint, Planner, Yammer, and more Office 365 services
  • Exchange email hosting and custom email domain
  • 1 TB of storage per user
  • Scheduled meetings
  • Meeting recording— available with Microsoft Stream
  • Phone calls and audio conferencing
  • Enforced multi-factor authentication for all users
  • Single sign-on to all business apps and services
  • Advanced auditing and reporting
  • Admin tools for managing users and apps
  • Usage reporting for Office 365 services
  • 99.9% financially-backed SLA uptime
  • Configurable user settings and policies
The sign-up process:
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It appears to create a new Office 365 tenant
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And you are in. Note upgrade banner
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Manage Org (users)
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Can Free Teams invite Office 365 users as members?
Yes, I was able to add an Office 365 user as a guest

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Does Teams to Teams or Teams to SfB Federation (cross Tenant chat/calling) work?

It appears not in my testing, external emails/UPN’s did not resolve

Can a free user login to Office 365/ OneDrive for business?
No, it appears not, they only have access to sign into Microsoft Teams
Can an Office 365 user/email account sign up for free Teams?
No, it tries to sign you into your enterprise Office 365/Teams
Got a question? Let me know?
Links

Video: Get Microsoft Teams for free – Plus Updates for Devs and IT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=KAvjlllE5x4

Get started with the free edition here: https://products.office.com/en-gb/microsoft-teams/free

Teams Free Subscription agreement: https://support.office.com/legal?llcc=en-us&aid=MOSA2018Agr(Apr2018)(IU).htm

Reference: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/07/12/4-new-ways-microsoft-365-takes-the-work-out-of-teamwork-including-free-version-of-microsoft-teams/

About the author

Tom Arbuthnot

A Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Master, Tom Arbuthnot is Founder and Principal at Empowering.Cloud as well as a Solutions Director at Pure IP.

Tom stays up to date with industry developments and shares news and his opinions on his Tomtalks.blog, UC Today Microsoft Teams Podcast and email list. He is a regular speaker at events around the world.

4 comments

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  • We’ve got O365 Business so basically Word, Excel etc.

    I see above

    “Can an Office 365 user/email account sign up for free Teams?

    No, it tries to sign you into your enterprise Office 365/Teams”

    would the same happen if I use my O365 admin account?

    I do have a seperate MS ID so should I sign up with that?

  • You added a guest at image 7, did you add the user from Teams directly. We’re testing Teams for our startup. We tried to add a guest into a new Team, in a new installation. As superadmin with all administrative privileges I get the error “We couldn’t add member.” “You are not authorized.”.

    The guest-feature is in azure enabled. If I add the guest on the azure-portal it works.

  • I am using Teams free with the same mail-address as my O365-Account. Even though I’m a owner I can’t find “manage org” as described here. The founder of the Teams free-organization is already out of it and it seems like we can not invite guests.

Tom Talks Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 news and opinions