Microsoft has announced the general availability of Teams Essentials, its first-ever standalone Microsoft Teams offering, designed specifically 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," Spataro added.

The solution comes with expansive limits and features for hosting professional meetings and collaborating in one place.

What it offers

It offers unlimited group meetings for up to 30 hours. Organisations can host meetings with up to 300 people. It offers 10 GB of cloud storage per user.

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

Users will not be required to sign up, sign in or install Teams to participate in a meeting.

It will also feature a new Google Calendar integration in addition to Outlook Calendar. This feature will be launched soon.

The solution also comes with professional meeting tools and capabilities like meeting lobby, virtual backgrounds, Together mode, live closed captions and live reactions. It also includes capabilities such as always-available chats in Microsoft Teams.

Users can also 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. This will be launched soon for desktop and web

Teams Essentials is priced at ₹100 per person per month.

Customers can buy Teams Essentials directly through the Teams website or from a variety of Microsoft Cloud Partners as per their requirement.

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