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Current Limit is 25,000 Members
Big Teams for Teams Fans
In a note to a UserVoice request to increase the maximum size of a team to facilitate company-wide communications, Microsoft said yesterday that “We are pleased to announce general availability of 5,000 member teams. Starting today, all new and existing teams can accommodate up to 5,000 members, double the previous limit. Larger groups can now collaborate effortlessly in a single team and leaders can connect with a broad audience within their organization.“
Update (March 2020): The Teams membership limit is now 10,000.
Update (May 22): Microsoft says that the increased limit for Teams membership (10,000) is now available worldwide.
Update (March 2021): The Teams membership limit is now 25,000 (except for GCC High/DOD tenants).
Large-scale Communications
https://office365itpros.com/2021/01/28/office-365-insights-microsoft-fy21q2-results/Microsoft has steadily increased the Teams membership limit since the product’s introduction to make Teams better able to cope with the need for large-scale communications inside big organizations. Given that 117 organizations have more than 100,000 Teams users and 2,700 have more than 10,000, the need to support large teams is obvious. I’m sure that Accenture, the largest user of Teams, will welcome the change as they probably have large teams in their 500,000 user base.
Team, Groups, Yammer, and Limits
Originally, the limit was was based on the capacity of Office 365 Groups (now Microsoft 365 Groups), but the scalability characteristics of Teams and Groups are markedly different because Teams members do not need the same level of concurrent access to the group mailbox as Groups does. Teams uses the Azure Cosmos DB service for its messages while Groups stores its conversations in the Inbox folder of the group mailbox.
Although some might think that the higher limit puts pressure on Yammer, I don’t think this is the case. Yammer is still capable of dealing with far larger user populations than Teams can. If you need company-wide discussions for a 50,000-person organization, Yammer can do the job while Teams still cannot.
Of course, some companies don’t like the idea of deploying yet another collaboration application within their tenant and are willing to live with the limit imposed by Teams and wait for Microsoft to increase the membership maximum further in the future.
This kind of change is exactly the reason why an updated eBook scores over the traditional printing model. For more information on Teams, see Chapter 13 in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.
One of my customers has about 3,000 people and the uptake of Yammer has been slower than Teams. I’m thinking that they should not spend any more time on increasing Yammer adoption and just focus on Teams. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Ooh… that’s a difficult call. But on balance I always revert to simplify situations whenever possible. That means concentrating on a single solution. In this case, I’d stay with Teams because it has faster development, is more integrated with the rest of Office 365, and is more functional.
If Teams is already fitting the organization’s needs, then you can focus on expanding its use versus focusing on getting people to use it in the first place. You’ll then be able to determine when/where there’s a need for Yammer to come in.