Microsoft Announces Teams Essentials to Assist Small Businesses

Microsoft has announced Teams Essentials, the independent Microsoft Teams service which has been designed to cater specifically to smaller businesses.

The newly announced Teams Essentials provides smaller businesses with a professional, but more importantly affordable meetings solution to encourage productivity, collaboration and connection in a hybrid work environment.

Jared Spataro, the Corporate Vice President of Modern work at Microsoft said that the company is aware of the difficulties faced by small businesses in the past 20 months, stating their need to show an extreme flexibility to adapt to changes usually with limited tools and resources. He then said that Teams Essentials has been built specifically to address the needs which small businesses have, empowering them so that they can thrive in the new era of work.

Some of the features provided by Microsoft’s Teams Essentials are: Unlimited group meetings which may last up to 30 hours, Meetings which may contain about 300 people and a cloud storage of 10GB for each user.

The new Teams Essentials service also has both existing and new capabilities in its free version to aid Small to Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs): Invitations only require an email address (users are not required to sign in or install Teams), you can maintain continuity with chats, new integration with Google calendar makes scheduling meetings easier, there are professional meeting tools like meeting lobbies and virtual backgrounds.

You can also start a group project and host meetings with anyone, while assigning tasks to teammates and can also create polls to receive feedback as quickly as possible all in a single hub.

According to LinkedIn, SME job postings are up about 81% year over year compared to that of November 2020. Small businesses really need the flexibility to be able to hire from anywhere, as well as the technology that can make the way for new employee workstyles, like synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.