Microsoft has released a free version of its Teams professional communications platform.

Teams – essentially Microsoft’s Slack competitor – previously required a monthly subscription to use the platform.

While this approach was suitable for large enterprise customers, it could be a prohibitive cost for small businesses – who subsequently turned to free systems.

The free version of Teams supports 300 users and a number of features present in the paid product, including:

Unlimited messages and search.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote apps in Teams.

Channel meetings.

Screen sharing.

1-to-1 and group online audio and video calls.

The free version allows for 2GB of file storage per user and 10GB of shared storage, notably less than the 1TB per user offered by the paid-for package.

Microsoft’s free tier of Teams is available from the Office website.

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