What Is Microsoft Teams Essentials?
Microsoft Teams Essentials is a standalone Microsoft Teams plan specifically designed for small and medium businesses. Teams Essentials provides small businesses, such as restaurants, retailers, and professional service providers, a platform to meet, collaborate, communicate, and serve their customers better. Apart from small businesses, Teams Essentials is also an affordable platform for nonprofits, religious organizations, schools, and community groups to connect and collaborate effectively without IT expertise. Teams Essentials extends the features and capabilities available in the free version of Microsoft Teams. In this article, we will explore how Teams Essentials can support the needs of small and medium businesses.
What Are the Features of Microsoft Teams Essentials?
Teams Essentials consolidates several of Microsoft Teams capabilities that have been customized for small businesses and community groups. Here are some of the features of Microsoft Teams Essentials.
- Microsoft Teams Essentials allows unlimited meetings of up to 30 hours, for both group and one-on-one meetings.
- Users can host up to 300 people in a single virtual room.
- Microsoft Essentials support for Google Calendar integration in addition to Outlook Calendar integration allows users to manage meetings and schedules with the existing calendaring tools.
- Meeting invites can be sent to email addresses using joining links. Users can join Teams meetings directly from their browsers without signing up, signing in, or installing the application.
- Meetings can be made interactive with tools and capabilities such as meeting lobby, virtual backgrounds, Together mode, live closed captions, and live reactions.
How Does Microsoft Teams Essentials Simplify Communication and Collaboration?
Microsoft Teams Essentials offers a unified platform for keeping chats, meetings, and other conversations in context, and helps in saving time. It provides a wide range of tools and applications, including Office web apps, file sharing, group chats, task management, to work efficiently with users within and outside the organization. Here are some ways in which Microsoft Teams Essentials helps in simplifying communication and collaboration.
- With 10 GB of file storage, users can co-author, view, and edit Office files, and discover files faster with advanced search capabilities.
- Conversations do not end when meetings end as they are persistent. This helps in keeping the context and continuity.
- Built-in chat templates for small business groups help in starting group projects and hosting meetings in which tasks can be assigned to teammates, and polls can be created for quick feedback.
- It eliminates the need to switch between applications even while working on projects outside the company.
- The mobile chat dashboard view in one-on-one and group chats provides convenient access to content organized based on locations, photos, files, task lists, upcoming events, weblinks, and other factors.
Apps4Rent Can Help with Microsoft Teams Adoption
Microsoft Teams Essential is a value for money product that offers rich communications features in a simple user interface at affordable costs. Similar to other cloud-based Microsoft solutions, Teams Essentials runs in Azure and guarantees security, reliability, performance, and support. While Teams Essentials provides small and medium businesses tools and capabilities for their core requirements, the application as a part of Microsoft 365/ Office 365 offers significantly more features and enhanced capabilities.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner for Collaboration and Content, Apps4Rent can help businesses procure Microsoft 365 and Teams licenses, and customize the solution based on the unique requirements of the organization. Call, email, or chat with our Microsoft Teams experts, available 24/7 for assistance.
