Forum Discussion
Figuring Out Our Teams Needs
(As in, our needs as far as Teams is concerned.)
Basically, we run a business operating a network of freelancers. We found Slack super-useful when we first started using it about 5 years ago, but quickly hit a place where we required paid features, and just couldn't justify the several-hundred-dollars-a-month expense of putting all our freelancers on a paid plan (back then there were 40 or so of us, now it's more like 80).
We moved to another tool (Ryver) which offered what we needed at a much better price, and have been reasonably happy with it ever since, but have recently started to feel that it might be faltering (support and updates have died off, feature requests have been left undealt with for years etc. etc.), and are now worried that it might fold, which would leave us without a vital tool for our business.
As such, we've been looking at alternatives, and Teams seems like it could be a really viable option for us, but at $12.50/user/month for the paid plan, we would only be able to switch to it if either the free version was workable for our needs, or if there might be a way of having only some people on the paid plan and others join as guests.
Despite doing a bunch of reading about the tool, I can't quite seem to get a definitive answer on this. For a start, there appears to be some kind of 5 guests per licensed user rule - does this mean that in order to have our entire network of freelancers (around 75 individuals) involved, we'd need to have...14 paid users as part of our Teams setup? And how is that allowance treated if, say, one of those paying members is already a member of another teams organisation elsewhere?
Or does none of this matter if we're using the free version?
Apologies - as I say, I've tried to unpick this through doing a bit of reading, but things get very soupy when trying to figure out the various subscriptions and versions on offer.
Any help massively appreciated!
12 Replies
Hi, would the Office 365 Business Essentials plan work? You only need Office 365 Business Premium if you want all the Office desktop apps.
https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-business-essentials
That’s $5 or $6 for a monthly or annual commitment. Or just use the free version of Teams with maximum of 300 members?
https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/differences-between-microsoft-teams-and-microsoft-teams-free-0b69cf39-eb52-49af-b255-60d46fdf8a9c
Cian Allner Thanks so much for this! Yeah, I've looked into both the things you mention, but the confusion is coming when I try to figure out what exactly the 'free' plan involves, and how having some kind of existing 365 account affects this.
Will I be able to set up a free Teams environment that all my freelancers will have access to regardless of whether they have Microsoft accounts? That seems to be what it's saying, but when trying to get a definitive answer on one of these things, the information available never seems to quite clear this up.
Will everyone be able to participate freely in the team setup for each project, and will I be able to adjust file permissions for all those users?What I'm keen to avoid, which has happened before with other tools, is going to a lot of trouble to set the environment up, only to discover that when we try to put it into practice, we immediately run up against things which require paid access that we can't afford (ie full paid accounts for all users).
- I would not recommend free Teams for your scenario because you will quickly run out of space in your free Teams tenant since it's limited to 10GB.
Also, by default Team members have access to all files in a Team. With Full Teams you'll be able to create SharePoint libraries with custom permissions but it's a fair bit of work and best to try to keep your Permissions set around different Teams.
As for the 1:5 it's only if you use Azure AD P1 premium features. Like enforcing MFA, Conditional acess etc. See this article which gives examples etc. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/b2b/licensing-guidance
So the big question is are these free lancers basically considered consultants? If so, then you can just have licenses to cover your actual organizations employee's and then have everyone invited as a guest with their own Office 365 business account or a personal Microsoft Account.
