Microsoft Thursday launched Teams Essentials, an exclusive tier of its Teams video conferencing and productivity solution for small and midsize businesses or SMBs. Teams Essentials has been designed specifically for small businesses, and this is the first-ever standalone offering of the video conferencing solution, Microsoft said.
The solution will give a professional as well as affordable solution to small businesses so that they can collaborate, connect as well as be productive while trying to navigate the hybrid working environment necessitated by the pandemic.
Microsoft Teams Essentials top features, India price
Microsoft has priced Teams Essentials at Rs 100 per person per month in India. According to Jared Spataro, the solution has been designed to meet the unique needs of small businesses.
According to the tech giant, the solution will offer unlimited group meetings for a duration of up to 30 hours, which can be attended by 300 people at once. Apart from this, every user would also get 10 GB of cloud storage with Teams Essentials.
Apart from this, the existing and new features available in Teams’ free version would also be available in Teams Essentials, the tech giant said. Among these is the ability to send meeting invites simply with the help of an email address, eliminating the need for others to sign up, sign in or even install Teams to attend meetings.
While Teams is, naturally, integrated with Outlook Calendar, it would soon also have a new Google Calendar integration. Meeting lobby, virtual backgrounds, Together mode, live reactions as well as live closed captions would also be offered, along with always available chats in Microsoft Teams.
A new small-business group chat template would also be coming soon to desktop and web versions of the solution, and using this, SMBs would be able to start a group project with anyone, while assigning tasks to teammates, as well as creating polls for feedback. Small businesses can purchase the solution directly from the Teams website set up by Microsoft.