An Easy Path from Free to Paid
Microsoft released the free version of Teams in July 2018. The free version supports up to 300 users and is intended to go up against the free version of Slack. And Microsoft hopes that organizations which adopt the free version will upgrade to the enterprise version and join the ranks of Office 365 tenants. Microsoft has now documented the upgrade process in a support article.
As you might expect, the upgrade is a one-way street with no way back. Once you join Office 365 and have a full tenant, you need to pay for all the user licenses. Behind the scenes, users who join a free tenant receive licenses like SharePoint Online kiosk that they don’t have to pay for (using the same model as guest users for a paid tenant), but once you move to be a full tenant, you get the pleasure of receiving monthly bills from Microsoft.
Given that we know that all free Teams tenants have a fully-functional Office 365 and Azure Active Directory tenant in the background, it comes as no surprise that all data is preserved by the upgrade. In effect, it seems like all Microsoft has to do is flip some switches in the background, assign the licenses bought during the upgrade, and hey presto, welcome to Office 365.
Teams for Surface Hub
In other Teams news, the Teams app for Surface Hub is now generally available. Much as I like the idea of the Surface Hub, I haven’t bought one. It’s just too expensive and I don’t want to give Microsoft even more money after I bought the Surface Book 2.
Read more about Teams in Chapter 13 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We don’t cover the Surface Hub there, but we suspect that most of our readers don’t notice (or care).