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Teams Licensing Changes Effective 1 April 2026
When Microsoft made Teams Premium generally available in February 2023, it moved some features from the standard version of Teams into Teams Premium to build out the new product. A lot of technology has evolved since then, and Microsoft has decided to revamp Teams Premium by moving some advanced event functionality back into Teams Enterprise.
At the same time, Microsoft is introducing “attendee capacity packs” to allow organizations to scale online events to support up to 100,000 participants. This replaces the previous arrangement where arrangements had to be made with the Large Event Assistance Program (LEAP). Other changes include expanding availability of Microsoft Places to more Microsoft 365 users.
Teams Premium isn’t going away. Microsoft hasn’t refreshed the overview page for Teams Premium to reflect the announced changes, but there’s still lots of functionality remaining for the premium license.
Events Functionality
Apart from scaling up participation limits for events, the best features being transferred to Teams Enterprise are:
- Availability of the Microsoft Enterprise Content Delivery Network to manage the bandwidth load for events.
- Meeting and event organizational branding.
- Real-time event insights to monitor broadcast performance during events.
Overall, the changes should make it easier for event organizers to manage webinars (Figure 1) and town hall events.
Microsoft would very much like to get rid of Teams Live Events, an older technology that town halls were intended to replace. Adding these and other features to town hall and webinar events organized by tenants with enterprise licenses makes it easier to deprecate Live Events. I expect Microsoft to announce the retirement of Live Events after customers get the chance to use the features newly available to them after April 2026.
Microsoft Places
Microsoft describes Places as “an AI-powered workplace app for flexible work.” I’ve never quite warmed to Places, probably because I don’t work in a large company that has flexible workspaces (aka hot desks) and rooms for people to reserve when they’re in the office. Until now, core Places features have been licensed through many Microsoft 365 and Office 365 products and Teams. Places Premium required a Teams Premium license, and the AI-based functionality is only available to users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
Microsoft is changing the basis for Places licensing to all licenses that enable access to an Outlook calendar (i.e., a calendar in an Exchange Online mailbox, including the Teams calendar), which is pretty well all the 446 million paid Microsoft 365 seats reported in Microsoft’s FY26 Q1 results. Users will have access to the Places Finder and Places Explorer components, both of which do precisely nothing without substantial configuration of the data that Places needs to function, such as descriptions for buildings and floors, floor plans, desks and rooms, and so on. That might sound negative, but magic seldom happens without preparation, and if you want to use an application like Places to help people organize their in-office days, Places needs to know about the physical fabric and layout of your buildings.
Teams Shared Space License
Microsoft loves to rename things. The Teams Shared Devices license becomes the Teams Shared Space license to reflect its purpose, which is now to license Teams connectivity through devices like panels, hot desk device, or a common area phone. The newly renamed license comes with the ability to integrate with third-party APIs for spatial data, floor plans, and “check-in signals,” which in this context means data from barrier systems that register the arrival of people within a building or other area.
Specific to Organizations
Changes to features enabled by licenses delight some organizations and are uninteresting news to others. Specific to this announcement, reaction depends on how an organization uses Teams town halls and webinars, Places, and Teams devices. It will be interesting to see how customer reaction unfolds.
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