Microsoft Teams
Licensing Changes
What's changing?
Microsoft has historically included Teams in all its various Microsoft 365 subscription plans.
As of April 1, 2024 this will not be the case for any new subscriptions for Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans (E3, E5 etc.) After this date, any new subscriptions for Microsoft 365 Enterprise will need to add-on a separate Teams subscription if they want to use that product in their organisation.
For Microsoft 365 Business subscriptions (Basic, Business and Premium) there will now be subscriptions that include Teams, and other subscriptions (that are cheaper) that do not include Teams.
Joel Macklow
Customer IT Strategist
What does this mean for me?
- If you already have Microsoft 365 and use Teams
Any Microsoft 365 Enterprise or Business subscription that your organisation has will currently include Teams. If you are currently utilising Teams as an organisation, nothing changes. You can continue to update, change, and renew your subscription. - If you already have Microsoft 365 and do not use Teams
At the date of your next subscription renewal, you can choose to change your subscription to one that does not include Teams - If you are starting out with or migrating to Microsoft 365
You can choose to have a subscription with or without Teams.
Recommendations
There are a limited number of organisations with a decentralised communications stack, perhaps augmenting core Microsoft Office productivity suites with disparate products like Dropbox, Slack and Zoom. It makes sense that these organisations may choose to have Microsoft 365 Enterprise or Business subscriptions without Teams if they don’t use it internally or have a requirement to interact with partner organisations using Teams
I’d suggest though that for most SMB in New Zealand, there won’t be much change here as long as the organisation has already been adopting Teams internally. Many NZ SMB have been making use of Teams and other elements of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem like SharePoint, Forms and the Power Platform to increase productivity and enable WFH. Teams has also enabled instant messaging collaboration with partner organizations, suppliers and clients as well easy voice and video meeting capability. Continuing on with subscriptions that include Microsoft Teams is a “no brainer”.
Next steps
If you’d like to discuss how these changes affect your business, please reach out to us and we can get together and work on putting together the right solution for your needs.