Credit to my friend Andrew Morpeth for first highlighting this, you should check out his blog. Microsoft sent out a message this week on the Office 365 admin centre announcing a free 1-year trial of Microsoft Teams will soon be available for any user of Office 365 or Azure Active Directory (AAD), even if the user is not yet licensed for the service.
This might initially sound a little odd. Pretty much all Office 365 licence levels include Microsoft Teams, so why would you need a free 1 year trial? There are certain plans that don’t have Microsoft Teams included that are open to this offer:
The service plans included in this trial offer are:
The trial is called “The IW trial offer for Microsoft Teams”. It’s not clear what IW stands for (information worker?). I’ll try to find out and update the post
An interesting gotcha: All trials within your organization share the same start and end dates, which is the date that first user signed for the trial. For example, if user A starts the first trial on April 25, 2018 and user B starts a trial on June 3, 2018, both users’ trial will expire on April 25, 2019. I much prefer the way PowerBI handles trials, which is timed on a per account basis.
Admins have the ability to switch on or off this feature for users within their tenant.
More details and how to enable/disable the trial here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/iw-trial-teams
A Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Master, Tom Arbuthnot is Founder and Principal at Empowering.Cloud as well as a Solutions Director at Pure IP.
Tom stays up to date with industry developments and shares news and his opinions on his Tomtalks.blog, UC Today Microsoft Teams Podcast and email list. He is a regular speaker at events around the world.
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Hi Tom,
It’s really nice to see that MS publish proper road-map for teams. This is what I really like! In my eyes the teams currently ‘beta’ quality product so this is a good move toward getting my trust in the product. The competition is strong as the Slack is the king of that market (as I see) but there are strong open source players as well like Mattermost.
The Teams promise a lot more than other products (not yet) with complete o365 integration, onenote, sharepoint, onedrive,… that’s great – but there is a HUGE problem with Teams.
We already piloted Slack, Mattermost, Teams and five more solutions and we use Skype, Skype for business – so I think we have a complete picture about the products available on the market.
The problem with Teams is that majority of our colleagues hate it while they love Slack and they are neutral with Mattermost. Really. Why?
The main reason is that it is very slow. Extremely slow! Changing a channel takes sometimes 5 secs or more. What??? No we can’t wait for it. the Windows client is even more slow than running it in a browser. It’s completely unacceptable.
Pushing this product to the market with 1 year free trial could be a big failure in this state. Come’on…Slack uses electron as well, it eats up a lot of memory too but it’s fast! Really. Visual Studio Code uses electron and it’s fast. The MS can put a lot of new features into Teams, can integrate all the functionality of SfB (which is nice and unique) but without rewriting the windows client, making it much faster and much more user friendly / nobody will use it. I like the concept and we already use some of the unique SfB funcitons (cloud streaming and recording, powerpoint file sharing,..) – so it’s very welcome to integrate those functions into Teams but we won’t use it anymore it MS doesn’t come out VERY SOON with a new client. As our colleagues hate it, we don’t have another choose than switch to another product…
How do you see this problem Tom?
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