Microsoft announced last October Teams Premium, a subscription version of the collaboration and communication service aimed at corporate users.
The new paid service was offered as a free preview at the end of last year and is now preparing to arrive on the market in the final versionat the price of 10 US dollars a month (until the end of June there will be an introductory offer that will lower the cost to 7 dollars a month).
Simultaneously, Microsoft decided to withdraw the version Teams Free (classic), with its free app for companies; the Redmond company has in fact announced that this type of access it will no longer be available starting next April 12th.
This does not mean that companies will necessarily be forced to pay a subscription: Microsoft is indeed planning to launch a new free variantwhich will be named Teams (Free)with a denomination that seems chosen on purpose to increase the confusion.
The new free service however, it will not have the same characteristics of the version nearing retirement: according to the Microsoft support page, in fact, it will offer “a different set of features than those available with free (classic) Teams”.
Keep the data stored
Even more problematic is the second part of the explanation: the transition to the new release it will not allow data migration stored within the service, such as files, existing channels, chats and recurring meetings.
The organizations they want to keep their data, they will have to sign up for a subscription instead for a fee: Microsoft has in fact created the Microsoft Teams Essentials offer, which includes group meetings for up to 30 hours and up to 300 participants, 10 Gbytes of cloud storage space per user and the ability to keep all information stored , at the price of 3.40 euros per month per user.
Alternatively, you have until April to manually export files and then re-import them into the new free variant of Teams, but to date there is no automated migration path that allows all other types of stored information to be extracted and then transferred to the new account.
