Microsoft announces Teams Essentials, a standalone Microsoft Teams offering for small businesses

Microsoft today announced Teams Essentials, a standalone Microsoft Teams offering for small businesses. Teams Essentials will cost $4 USD per person, per month and will offer the following:

• Unlimited group meetings for up to 30 hours
• Meetings with up to 300 people
• 10 GB of cloud storage per user

When compared to Slack, Teams Essentials offers a more professional and affordable meetings solution for small businesses.

“We know how difficult the past 20 months have been for small businesses. They’ve had to demonstrate extreme flexibility to adapt, often with limited access to tools and technology,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Modern Work at Microsoft. “Teams Essentials is built specifically to meet the unique needs of small businesses, enabling them to thrive in this new era of work.”

Teams Essentials also includes existing and new capabilities available in the free version of Teams:

• Simple, easy invitations require only an email address. Users are not required to sign up, sign in or install Teams to participate in a meeting.
• In addition to Outlook Calendar integration, new Google Calendar integration makes it easy to schedule meetings in Microsoft Teams. *Coming soon
• Professional meeting tools and capabilities like meeting lobby, virtual backgrounds, Together mode, live closed captions and live reactions.
• Never lose context or continuity with always-available chats in Microsoft Teams.
• Quickly start a group project and host meetings with anyone, assign tasks to teammates, and create polls to receive feedback quickly all in one hub with the new small-business group chat template. *Coming soon to desktop and web

Businesses can buy Teams Essentials from the Teams website or through variety of Microsoft Cloud Partners to suit their needs.

Source: Microsoft