Microsoft has launched Teams Essentials, a new video calling app, separate from the Office 365 package. Until now, professionals and companies who wanted to use Teams for work had to support a subscription to the Office 365 service, which offers numerous benefits, including the access and creation of documents and other work files directly in the cloud, to support collaboration and remote work, which exploded with the pandemic.
The will of Microsoft, with the independent app, is to meet the needs of those who just need a platform with which to make video calls, without the expensive cost of a broader subscription. In fact, with the launch of Essentials, the Redmond giant is even more in direct competition with Zoom, especially for the paid version of the same, which allows you to have, among other things, transcription and translation of the text in real time and a larger limit of participants. Recently, Google also updated its Meet platform to allow access to 500 people in the same room, doubling the previous limit of 250.
"Teams Essentials was created specifically to meet the needs of small and medium-sized businesses" explained Jared Spataro, vice president of Microsoft 365 division. The price of the new suite is 3.4 euros per month per single user and provides chat and unlimited group meetings lasting up to 30 hours, meetings for up to 300 participants and 10 GB of cloud storage space for each user.
