Microsoft has unveiled Teams Essentials, a version of Teams aimed at small businesses. It’s a standalone product that nestles between the free Teams plan and the features that come with a Microsoft 365 subscription.
What’s the Cost?
Teams Essentials costs £3 per user per month. It includes unlimited group meetings for up to 30 hours and as many as 300 participants, compared with a 60-minute time limit and a maximum of 100 participants on the free plan. Users also get 10GB of cloud storage — twice as much as those on the free tier — and integration with Outlook and will soon integrate with Google calendars.
Other features from the free tier are included, such as access to Office web apps, chats with colleagues and customers, file sharing, polls and group projects. Meetings, chats, calls and files are all encrypted. Users can send meeting invites to someone who doesn’t have a Teams account — they just need that person’s email address. It also comes with the popular Virtual Backgrounds and Together Mode.
Does My Business Need This?
According to LinkedIn data, SMB open job postings are up 81.9% year over year compared to Nov. 1, 2020. More than ever, small businesses need the flexibility to hire from anywhere and technology that opens the door to new employee work styles, such as synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. Teams Essentials offers small businesses an affordable way to work, collaborate and grow. Customers can buy Teams Essentials from a variety of Microsoft Cloud Partners such as ICA .
If you’re unsure about which version of Microsoft Teams is best suited to your business, ICA can complete a full analysis of your working environment so that you can get the best out of your communications solutions and what this will mean moving forward for Telephony, with Microsoft already integrating with many telephony platforms with Direct Routing.
What is Direct Routing?
For those unsure of the term, Direct Routing offering is more cost effective and flexible. Plus you get the added benefits such as call quality, number management and porting. Our Direct Routing product offers a greater minutes bundle per user, per month, as well as enhanced features with our SIP Trunk Call Manager Platform.
Number porting with Microsoft can be very complex and time consuming. ICA are communication specialists and number porting and migrations are standard practice for us.
We understand that your business may also require a little more sophistication and intelligence. That’s why ICA also offers PBX functionality and CRM integration through Teams with our other vendor platforms such as Callswitch and Wildix.
Get in touch with a member of the team today to start your Microsoft Teams Journey
