Microsoft to Offer Teams Premium for Self-Service Purchase

Users Can Sign Up for Sixty Day Teams Premium Trial License

Is MSCommerce (the “PowerShell Module for accessing Microsoft Commerce APIs”) the worse PowerShell module produced by Microsoft? The thought went through my mind when I loaded version 1.9 of the module (the latest available from the PowerShell gallery, updated a mere 25 days ago) to find that not only did the module not support PowerShell 7, but it barely worked on PowerShell 5.

Well, barely rates the module too highly. Yes, the cmdlets generate output, but it’s odd output that’s not pipeable and is barely usable. So MSCommerce 1.9 is a terrible module, which is why I deleted it and went back to version 1.8 to work with the Teams Premium Trial offer that Microsoft is keen to offer to end users. For the record, I used these commands:

Uninstall-Module Mscommerce
Install-Module Mscommerce -RequiredVersion 1.8 -Scope AllUsers

Teams Premium Trial

According to MC670435 (24 Aug 2023), in late September, end users in commercial tenants “will be able to initiate a self-service trial of Microsoft Teams Premium using their Azure Active Directory (AAD) credentials with no requirement to input payment information.” In other words, users can decide to kick the tires for Teams Premium for sixty days to see if it’s worth the $10 monthly fee (available for $7/month until December 31, 2023). These licenses are different to the 30-day trial licenses available for 25 users within a tenant.

Microsoft hopes that the trial will “generate signals on utilization for IT to identify users that would benefit from a Teams Premium license.”

Tenant administrators can terminate the trial licenses at any time (or remove them from user accounts). At the end of the sixty-day trial period, the organization can decide to drop the trial or move to a paid basis by buying some “real” Teams Premium licenses. More information about administration of self-service purchases is available in Microsoft documentation.

The Worth of Teams Premium

Microsoft announced Teams Premium at the Ignite 2022 conference. Annoyingly, Microsoft followed up the announcement by moving four features from Teams Standard to Teams Premium. In July 2023, Microsoft said that they had sold 600,000 Teams Premium licenses, which sounds a lot until you remember it’s only 0.2% of the 300 million Teams monthly active user base. Microsoft is obviously very keen to increase the $72 million annual run rate for Teams Premium to a much higher number, which is why trials are available.

I quite like some of the Teams Premium features, the best being intelligent recap of meetings. However, deciding if Teams Standard is sufficient for your day-to-day team collaboration or you need the extra boost delivered by Teams Premium is highly subjective.

Managing Self-Service Purchases

Microsoft started selling self-service purchases to end users with Power BI Premium in 2021. Since that time, it has steadily increased the number of available products, such as the Windows 365 plans. A more recent addition is the Python in Excel add-on, announced in MC669648 on August 22, 2023. Many organizations don’t want users do purchase software, and that’s where the MsCommerce module comes into play. If you want to stop users seeing a product, you must disable it in the MsCommerce inventory.

For example, to block purchases of the Teams Premium trial, import the module, connect to the MsCommerce endpoint and run the Get-MsCommerceProductPolicies cmdlet to find the Teams Premium trial. Then set the Enabled state to False. Here’s what I did:

Import-Module MsCommerce
Connect-MsCommerce

Get-MSCommerceProductPolicies -PolicyId AllowSelfServicePurchase | Where-Object {$_.ProductName -eq "Teams Premium" }| ForEach {Update-MSCommerceProductPolicy -PolicyId AllowSelfServicePurchase -ProductId $_.ProductId -Enabled $False }
Update policy product success

ProductName   ProductId    PolicyId                 PolicyValue
-----------   ---------    --------                 -----------
Teams Premium CFQ7TTC0RM8K AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Success

To list the full set of self-service products available to users and their current state, run this command:

Get-MSCommerceProductPolicies -PolicyId AllowSelfServicePurchase | Sort-Object ProductName

ProductName                                            ProductId    PolicyId                 PolicyValue
-----------                                            ---------    --------                 -----------
Dynamics 365 Marketing                                 CFQ7TTC0LH3N AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled
Dynamics 365 Marketing Additional Application          CFQ7TTC0LHVK AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled
Dynamics 365 Marketing Additional Non-Prod Application CFQ7TTC0LHWM AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled
Dynamics 365 Marketing Attach                          CFQ7TTC0LHWP AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled
Microsoft 365 F3                                       CFQ7TTC0LH05 AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled
Power Apps per user                                    CFQ7TTC0LH2H AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Power Automate per user                                CFQ7TTC0LH3L AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Power Automate Per User with Attended RPA Plan         CFQ7TTC0LSGZ AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled
Power Automate RPA                                     CFQ7TTC0KXG6 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Power BI Premium per user                              CFQ7TTC0H6RP AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Power BI Pro                                           CFQ7TTC0H9MP AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Project Plan 1                                         CFQ7TTC0HDB1 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Project Plan 3                                         CFQ7TTC0HDB0 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Python On Excel                                        CFQ7TTC0S3X1 AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled
Teams Exploratory                                      CFQ7TTC0J1FV AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled
Teams Premium                                          CFQ7TTC0RM8K AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Visio Plan 1                                           CFQ7TTC0HD33 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Visio Plan 2                                           CFQ7TTC0HD32 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Viva Goals                                             CFQ7TTC0PW0V AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled
Viva Learning                                          CFQ7TTC0HVZG AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled
Windows 365 Business                                   CFQ7TTC0J203 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Windows 365 Business with Windows Hybrid Benefit       CFQ7TTC0HX99 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Windows 365 Enterprise                                 CFQ7TTC0HHS9 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled

Teams Premium Needs a Comprehensive Trial

If an organization is interested in Teams Premium, I recommend that you run a planned trial by selecting a department to test and assigning trial licenses to 25 people to use over 30 days. I don’t see much value in individual users getting trial licenses to test on their own. Teams is all about collaboration, and collaboration involves multiple people. Taking that logic further, it seems like the right approach is to test as a team and not as an individual.

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