Microsoft Teams Essentials arrives, is targeted at small business owners

By Robert Carnevale
published

Microsoft will not rest until everyone is on Teams.

Microsoft Teams PC
Microsoft Teams PC (Image credit: Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • Microsoft has released a new edition of Teams, Teams Essentials.
  • It's targeted at small businesses and sells at $4 per user per month.
  • It supports large meeting capacities, long meetings, and additional cloud storage.

Teams Essentials has arrived to give Microsoft-inclined small business owners a version of Teams suited for their unique needs. It will cost $4 per user per month, which Microsoft claims makes it "the most affordable all-in-one solution in the market today."

Teams Essentials is currently available from Microsoft itself as well as a large host of Microsoft Cloud Partners, including Vodafone and Ingram. You can see the full list at the company's blog post (opens in new tab) on its new Teams service, which also details Essentials' enhanced operating capabilities. These include:

  • Extended meeting times — With meetings that can last up to 30 hours, there's no need to worry about your Teams Essentials meeting running over its time limit, whether you're meeting one-on-one or in a group.
  • Large meeting capacity — With the ability to host up to 300 people at once, Teams Essentials offers the ability to bring everyone into the same virtual room.
  • Additional cloud storage — Don't worry about running out of storage or wasting time searching for documents. Easily co-author, view, edit, and store Office 365 files. Teams Essentials offers a total of 10 gigabytes (GB) file storage, which is twice the amount of storage available in the free version of Teams.

Microsoft is also angling Teams Essentials at religious organizations, schools, and nonprofits.

Image (opens in new tab)

Microsoft Teams Essentials (opens in new tab)

Teams' latest edition

Microsoft Teams Essentials is here for your small business needs, whether you're running an actual small business or a church, nonprofit, or school.

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Robert Carnevale
Robert Carnevale

Robert Carnevale is the News Editor for Windows Central. He's a big fan of Kinect (it lives on in his heart), Sonic the Hedgehog, and the legendary intersection of those two titans, Sonic Free Riders. He is the author of Cold War 2395. Have a useful tip? Send it to robert.carnevale@futurenet.com.

2 Comments
  • $4 per user per month, so a small business who have said have 12 employees will be paying $48 a month, may not sound a lot, but could be for a small buisness, certainly the way things are at the moment. If they really need something like teams, plenty of free options around. May not have the MS integration, but will do for what most will use it for.
    No need for teams in my places and yet it is pushed onto people and solve nothing.
  • There is nothing that does what Teams does. Lots of options do pieces of what Teams does. Slack provides chat. Zoom provides video conferences. Dropbox and Onedrive provide file sharing (but no security on consumer Onedrive). Jira and Trello provide task management tools. RingCentral and Ooma provide VoIP phone service. But nothing integrates these so beautifully or provides the file collaboration with real time commenting and Channel Tabs of Teams (Google docs is closest, but a pale comparison). Teams is by far the biggest new thing to come from MS since Excel, but it's more innovative, given that Excel started largely as a Lotus copy.