Microsoft is making a major change to Teams, moving some features behind its Teams Premium subscription service.
Teams is the leading corporate messaging platform, eclipsing its main rival Slack by a wide margin. Microsoft has leveraged the popularity of its Microsoft 365 office suite and largely made Teams available for free.
According to a note to its partners, however, some of Teams features — including some if its more popular ones — will now require a Teams Premium subscription. The following features are impacted:
- Live caption translation
- Intelligent recording markers to identify when individual joined or left
- Organization meeting branding and organization Together mode
- Virtual appointment text reminders
- Virtual appointment dashboard for scheduling features, queues, and analytics
Microsoft does offer a 30-day trial of Teams Premium to help organizations decide if the features are worth upgrading.
Partners can start sharing the news with their customers to start enrolling tenants in the preview as a trial through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center by searching for Teams Premium in the catalog. Once enrolled and activated, tenant admins receive a limited number of 30-day trial licenses that they can assign to users in their organization.