Anyone understand the new MS Teams licencing?
Discussion
We have a group of 7 people working on a project & we use Teams to collaborate - it works very well. The leader has a Teams Free (Classic) account in which we created a Team & each member has their own Free (Classic) account & has been invited to be a Team member. There's no central company or organisation (we're all contracotrs) so each person has their own Teams account: no overarching MS 365 account or the like is involved.
Now MS are changing the rules & if we want to keep the old Team & all the chats etc it has to be changed to one of the paid accounts. There is a new Free account but you can't migrate old data into it.
What we aren't clear about is if the leader/owner migrates to the paid version are all the Members counted as Users & need to be paid for, or can they just change to the new Free account & still be members of the new Team?
Anyone have any experience of changing from old Free to new Free Teams?
Now MS are changing the rules & if we want to keep the old Team & all the chats etc it has to be changed to one of the paid accounts. There is a new Free account but you can't migrate old data into it.
What we aren't clear about is if the leader/owner migrates to the paid version are all the Members counted as Users & need to be paid for, or can they just change to the new Free account & still be members of the new Team?
Anyone have any experience of changing from old Free to new Free Teams?
Firstly, MS is making Teams an utter nightmare. It's really awful now and will be worse from April when the free tier goes south.
It is my understanding that an M365 account gets certain things above free for individual/family, you get some storage, some extra limits on calls (duration, particpants). The whole client will become an issue on Windows and Mac and the document sharing becomes a bit, well, crap. From what I can see, it will be files in the context of a chat.
It's clear Teams not on an edu or E subscription will become somewhat useless, certainly very different.
It is my understanding that an M365 account gets certain things above free for individual/family, you get some storage, some extra limits on calls (duration, particpants). The whole client will become an issue on Windows and Mac and the document sharing becomes a bit, well, crap. From what I can see, it will be files in the context of a chat.
It's clear Teams not on an edu or E subscription will become somewhat useless, certainly very different.
Teams has always been two different products, Personal and Business, under one brand, both are pretty good, but using the free personal one for business stuff is where you're likely to have problems.
Personal Teams is a pretty good competitor for WhatsApp now for groups because you can add Calendars there, except that everyone uses WhatsApp, not everyone uses Teams.
Business Teams with a bit of tweaking and organisation is a really good project management tool, much better than the free offering. But if you don't have an over-arching organisation it's a bit less clear how to make that work.
If your main person creates a Paid for Teams account, ie they buy an M365 license, they will be able to add guest users to a Teams Site, but those guest users also need their own M365 license. I think. I suspect this will work really well, but obviously costs. There's an absolute ton of make-your-life-easier stuff there for you if you have your own M365 Tenant and it's pretty cheap for a single user. The collaboration experience is way beyond your current setup.
Personal Teams is a pretty good competitor for WhatsApp now for groups because you can add Calendars there, except that everyone uses WhatsApp, not everyone uses Teams.
Business Teams with a bit of tweaking and organisation is a really good project management tool, much better than the free offering. But if you don't have an over-arching organisation it's a bit less clear how to make that work.
If your main person creates a Paid for Teams account, ie they buy an M365 license, they will be able to add guest users to a Teams Site, but those guest users also need their own M365 license. I think. I suspect this will work really well, but obviously costs. There's an absolute ton of make-your-life-easier stuff there for you if you have your own M365 Tenant and it's pretty cheap for a single user. The collaboration experience is way beyond your current setup.
paulrockliffe said:
Teams has always been two different products, Personal and Business, under one brand, both are pretty good, but using the free personal one for business stuff is where you're likely to have problems.
Possibly, but it's worked very well so far on a project with contractors from Hong Kong to Canada. The problem is there's no overarching organisation. paulrockliffe said:
Personal Teams is a pretty good competitor for WhatsApp now for groups because you can add Calendars there, except that everyone uses WhatsApp, not everyone uses Teams.
Business Teams with a bit of tweaking and organisation is a really good project management tool, much better than the free offering. But if you don't have an over-arching organisation it's a bit less clear how to make that work.
If your main person creates a Paid for Teams account, ie they buy an M365 license, they will be able to add guest users to a Teams Site, but those guest users also need their own M365 license. I think. I suspect this will work really well, but obviously costs. There's an absolute ton of make-your-life-easier stuff there for you if you have your own M365 Tenant and it's pretty cheap for a single user. The collaboration experience is way beyond your current setup.
But can those guest users be on the New Free Teams or does the key person have to buy a Paid Teams licence then add them as users & pay £4 a month for each of them? That's the bit we can't clarify. These people aren't employees as such. At the moment we're debating if we need to keep all the old chat or if we just lose it & start again. We don't touch the sides of what Teams can do so we can get by with the basic offering. Business Teams with a bit of tweaking and organisation is a really good project management tool, much better than the free offering. But if you don't have an over-arching organisation it's a bit less clear how to make that work.
If your main person creates a Paid for Teams account, ie they buy an M365 license, they will be able to add guest users to a Teams Site, but those guest users also need their own M365 license. I think. I suspect this will work really well, but obviously costs. There's an absolute ton of make-your-life-easier stuff there for you if you have your own M365 Tenant and it's pretty cheap for a single user. The collaboration experience is way beyond your current setup.
vaud said:
Sporky said:
We use Zoom and Teams at work.
I cannot help but think poorly of the people who prefer Teams. It's a clunky car crash by comparison.
I way prefer teams to zoom...I cannot help but think poorly of the people who prefer Teams. It's a clunky car crash by comparison.
I haven't used Zoom since the pandemic, but I remember thinking it was a complete s
t-show compared to Teams back then.paulrockliffe said:
They're two very different things, they're only comparable if you only use Teams for calls and chat, but that's barely 5% of what it's for.
I haven't used Zoom since the pandemic, but I remember thinking it was a complete st-show compared to Teams back then.
Indeed. We are quite advanced users of teams with sharepoint integration, bunch of productivity tools, mural, etc. It's more of a collaborative tool with a video call on top.I haven't used Zoom since the pandemic, but I remember thinking it was a complete s
t-show compared to Teams back then.Mr Pointy said:
But can those guest users be on the New Free Teams or does the key person have to buy a Paid Teams licence then add them as users & pay £4 a month for each of them? That's the bit we can't clarify. These people aren't employees as such. At the moment we're debating if we need to keep all the old chat or if we just lose it & start again. We don't touch the sides of what Teams can do so we can get by with the basic offering.
Pretty sure the answer is no, someone needs to pay for each user. I just checked the pricing and spotted there's now a Teams only license which is £3 a month + VAT, so not sure if that's what you're referring to. I suspect that one you'll all need to be in the same company, but also it's very poor value compared with £4.50+VAT for the version that includes more stuff and doesn't need you to all be in a single tenant. And that's poor value for money compared with the Enterprise License that's £7.50 a month.
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