Microsoft launches Teams Essentials for small businesses

2 Dec 2021

Microsoft has announced the general availability of Teams Essentials, the first-ever standalone Microsoft Teams offering, designed specifically for small businesses. "We know how difficult the past 20 months have been for small businesses. They've had to demonstrate extreme flexibility to adapt, often with limited access to tools and technology," said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Modern Work at Microsoft. "Teams Essentials is built specifically to meet the unique needs of small businesses, enabling them to thrive in this new era of work."

Microsoft launches Teams Essentials for small businesses

Teams Essentials provides the following features:

Unlimited group meetings for up to 30 hours
Meetings with up to 300 people
10 GB of cloud storage per user

Teams Essentials also includes existing and new capabilities available in the free version of Teams to meet the needs of small businesses:

Simple, easy invitations require only an email address. Users are not required to sign up, sign in or install Teams to participate in a meeting.
In addition to Outlook Calendar integration, new Google Calendar integration makes it easy to schedule meetings in Microsoft Teams.
Professional meeting tools and capabilities like meeting lobby, virtual backgrounds, Together mode, live closed captions and live reactions.
Never lose context or continuity with always-available chats in Microsoft Teams.
Quickly start a group project and host meetings with anyone, assign tasks to teammates, and create polls to receive feedback quickly all in one hub with the new small-business group chat template. *Coming soon to desktop and web

According to LinkedIn data, SMB open job postings are up 81.9% year over year compared to 1 November 2020. More than ever, small businesses need the flexibility to hire from anywhere and technology opens the door to new employee workstyles, such as synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.