Get Microsoft Teams for free – Updates for Devs and IT – Microsoft Mechanics Summary

With last weeks announcement of a free version of Microsoft Teams there’s a video published with Dan Stevenson from Microsoft featured on the Microsoft Mechanics show.

Here’s a summary of the video, hope you its useful.

Watch the video here

Microsoft Teams has been around a while now with Office 365 subscriptions but there a new way to get it.

Dan talks around there is now a new FREE way to start using Microsoft Teams ! your a small business or group of people together.

Microsoft have a sign up page at http://office.com/teamsfree

at the sign up page i can compares the differences between free and paid subscriptions.

To sign up for free simply click the sign up for free button

Enter your email address

answer a few questions about yourself

after this your new free Teams environment is setup !

Dan shows us one he’s created earlier

Here’s teams free and Dan’s example Teams of Contoso Sheep Farm

We have all the features you expect from Teams with features and channels, chat, stickers

When you first come into Teams Free your asked to add a bunch of people which Dan has done and the people have been added

Dan walks us over adding Jeremy into the Sheep Farm team

add the email address for the person you want to add, which will send out an invite

Lets check out what Jeremy sees

Jeremy has the invite and can see Dan invited him

Click join Teams

Click Accept

Open in web app or download the Teams client

Jeremy can see the Team

Can we also do Video based Chat or Screen sharing ?

Yes, basically core features of paid Teams.

Mobile apps work for free as well.

Taken from Tech Community post https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Introducing-a-free-version-of-Microsoft-Teams/ba-p/214592

The free version includes the following for up to 300 people:

Unlimited chat messages and search.
Built-in audio and video calling for individuals, groups, and full team meetups.
10 GB of team file storage plus additional 2 GB per person for personal storage.
Integrated, real-time content creation with Office Online apps, including built-in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
Unlimited app integrations with 140+ business apps to choose from—including Adobe, Evernote, and Trello.
Ability to communicate and collaborate with anyone inside or outside your organization, backed by Microsoft’s secure, global infrastructure.

Who’s eligible for the free version of Microsoft Teams?

Any person with any corporate or consumer email address can sign up for Teams today. People who don’t already have a paid Office 365 commercial subscription will have access to the free version of Teams. If an existing Office 365 commercial customer tried to sign up for free, they will be routed into a managed experience for their existing tenant.

What’s the differences with Paid ?

can have more than 300 users
scheduled meetings
Phone Calling
Dial In conferencing
Power of Exchange
1Tb storage
Office client apps depending on SKU
Upgrade full set of IT, compliance and control, dev option, support and uptime.

What’s new for developers ?

working on integrating SharePoint app platform into Teams

There’s updates to PowerShell and Graph API for Teams

improvements to managing Teams lifecycle

and updates to the Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business admin centre

finally compliance and security are important and there’s been update for Teams

Can we see these updates in actions ?

Here we are in the Store

made it possible to have personal access for apps such as planner

I can publish LOB Apps into the store for users to see

We have different LOB apps, expenses, Hiring, third party app Intumit SmartO (O365 helpdesk), NEO (a new employee app) and time off app.

how easy to build apps ?

Head over to the Teams App Studio

superhub for building app manifest and preview code

Control Library

once done i can export config for my app and do the coding in vs code

Code for the NEO app for Q and A apps for new employees

Im using Lewis which uses text analysis and natural language

adaptive cards for bot responses

Actions to send

Here’s the app in Teams

I asked how’s my HR contact

I mentioned i lost my badge and have a options displayed

can type handbook and pull up the employee handbook

displayed as interactive card and have to accept and confirm acceptance of terms

Open the handbook up

The office 365 helpdesk app

Can ask questions to the helpdesk app and get responses

The hiring app

Chat with bot and keep on top of interview status

That’s a quick taste of what you can do with LOB apps in Teams.

For more info and code samples check out http://aka.ms/dev4teams

What happens if your not a coder and want to build apps for Teams ?

We can connect Microsoft Forms thorough Flow into Teams and Text analysis engine to catch any negative comments quickly.

basic form to ask some questions

now we have connected this to Flow and piping the responses into AI text and scoring it

if sentiment if negative posting a message into the HR channel in Teams

Run through of the form and adding a negative sentiment to test it out

click submit

and lets see what happens in Teams

Message landed in Teams

Go to survey Results

Can i automate Teams for provisioning ?

Yes, we have powerful PowerShell cmdlet and updated graph APIs

Using Teams and PowerShell to create a Team

adding users

installing the NEO app

Run Script in PowerShell and create a Team

creates teams, channel and adds users

Jeremy has added to the new Team and lets see what Jeremy sees now

I see the Team

can also do private chat with NEO as well

What are we doing to manage the lifecycle of Teams ?

easy to create who can create a team, Dan recommends leaving open as much as possible so it doesn’t prevent collaboration, controls with admin with naming policies.

Im not allowed to create a teams named Payroll or Finance