Forum Discussion
Figuring Out Our Teams Needs
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.ChrisWebbTech Thanks so much for your response here. So having full Teams accounts for my core team members, and then inviting all freelancers (who are indeed basically consultants) as guests would only incur costs for the core members?
That could work, but I guess it would depend on what privileges guests are allowed. Will do some further digging into that.
Thanks again!
Oli
Yes, it could be clearer, but you can invite someone using any email address or just sending a link (someone correct me if there is more to it than that please):
https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/invite-people-to-teams-free-53a9b20c-2ad7-442e-967c-2e9305e96463
Here is a demo
https://youtu.be/KAvjlllE5x4?t=66
This was the clearest https://www.petri.com/free-teams-version-works (more detail in the link):
”Once created, you can invite other users to join your tenant. Users can come from other vanity domains or consumer services or they can come from Office 365 or Azure Active Directory domains”
Cian Allner Thanks again! Just doing some side reading to figure out what things like 'tenant' etc. mean. But this is all super useful stuff!
