Microsoft Teams is now free. Not all of it, but enough parts to be useful, and to possibly entice more organisations into the Teams fold and away from competing collaboration tools, like Slack.
That’s because Microsoft has made it possible to try Teams before you buy; the announcement was made in a slick virtual news briefing yesterday afternoon.
Of course, the free version of Teams cuts out some pretty useful features of the full app: there is no ability to schedule meetings or record them, there is less integration with Office 365, and users get less cloud storage.
Free users get just 2GB each and 10GB of shared storage, which in 2018 is just enough that you’ll be tempted to use it but which will likely run out very quickly.
For the full list of what is and isn’t available in the free version of Teams, click here.
On paper, Microsoft Teams looks pretty useful: it does not limit the amount of messages you can send and search through; Slack, by comparison, limits this to your last 10k messages. Free Teams also lets you have up to 300 users, and integrates with more than 140 other services.
And should you find Teams useful, and you find yourself willing to pay for its full feature-set, it costs just R65 per user, per month. You have nothing to lose, then, by giving it a try.
For a more visual explanation, here is the official video introducing Microsoft Teams:
