Microsoft To Move Some Teams Features To More Costly 'Premium' Edition

Microsoft has revealed that a Premium cut of its Teams cloudy collaborationware suite will debut in early February, and some features that are currently included in Microsoft 365 will move to the new -- more costly -- product. From a report: As Microsoft's licensing guide clarifies: "some Teams features will move from Teams licenses to Teams Premium licenses." Those features are:
Live translated captions;
Timeline markers in Teams meeting recordings for when a user left or joined meetings;
Custom organization Together mode scenes;
Virtual Appointments - SMS notifications;
Virtual Appointments - Organizational analytics in the Teams admin center;
Virtual Appointments - Scheduled queue view.

I'm outraged.

[RightSaidFred99]

Outraged, I tell you! Well..not that outraged. Who gives a fuck, lol?

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[ozzymodus12]

Enterprise customers and school districts. However, I couldn't care less as an administrator. The less it does, the happier I am. That mean less issues for me to troubleshoot.

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[tbords]

Enterprise customers and school districts. However, I couldn't care less as an administrator. The less it does, the happier I am. That mean less issues for me to troubleshoot.

The only difficult part here is explaining to the users their favorite feature is now a business expense that needs to be justified.

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[mjwx]

Outraged, I tell you! Well..not that outraged. Who gives a fuck, lol?

Anyone who is forced to use Teams at work.

My company used to use Slack, it worked well but then MS came in and said "hey, Teams is free, use Teams" and so the bean counters switched. Now MS has the numbers it needs to start squeezing them for more licensing fees. I guarantee you more features will become "premium" and "enterprise" only and MS will make moving back to Slack as painful as possible.

Microsoft using the old "first hit is free" trick... they've never done this before /s

I have to use Teams every day

[93 Escort Wagon]

It's quite the substandard piece of software! I find it hilarious that anyone would refer to any aspect of it as "premium".

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[Tough Love]

Teams is a serious piece of shit. Cut and paste doesn't even work.

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[MoHaG]

... anymore...

It seems like the developers are given a list of working features to break...

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[nightflameauto]

I'm just surprised you aren't required to compose chat messages in XML.

That's a special feature coming in the next release cycle!

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[MoHaG]

That is one thing...

The other thing was that they removed leading (and repeated) whitespace, even in monospaced blocks, which made it useless for pasting code or command output.

That was fixed, but they now strip newlines in monospaced blocks....

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[thomn8r]

Teams is a serious piece of shit.

It would quite a bit of enhancement to elevate Teams to the status of "piece of shit"

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[jenningsthecat]

Teams is a serious piece of shit.

Funny you should say that! Based on my wife's work experiences with Teams I've recently taken to referring to anything that's audaciously and unapologetically crappy as "a Teamsing pile of shit".

what a stupid idea

[zeiche]

moving features that were once free to a paid product has never pissed off a single customer. ugh.

rather than demonstrate how badly planned the Teams rollout was, perhaps Microsoft could have come up with new features that people want to pay for. but what do i know?

Oh no!

[mobby_6kl]

Not this! Not the beloved organizational analytics feature!

pay more or get less (welcome to the cloud)

[Joe_Dragon]

pay more or get less (welcome to the cloud)

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[DarkRookie2]

pay more and get less (welcome to the cloud) FIFY

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[youngone]

The vast corporation I work for has decided on a strategy of "everything in the cloud" and OneDrive is a key piece of that.
These types of features are what we get for free, due to our size but I'm guessing once Microsoft have all our user data we'll have to start paying.

I would be upset about it if my boss could get me to care, but he can't.

Next up, "your" desktop.

[waspleg]

Subscribe to "your" computer for only $20/mo!?!! What a steal!

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[Tom]

ob: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy... [gnu.org]

(whatever you think of the guy, he's spot on in this question)

SKU zoo

[fermion]

And bait and switch. It has been all but impossible to know exactly what you getting when you buy a MS license. That is why I always bought the most complete version possible on the grey market.

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[RitchCraft]

"grey market" ... LOL Ahoy Matey!

Live Captions!?

[pi_rules]

They're putting live captions, an accessibility aid for those with hearing issues, as a premium feature?!

Argh. They better not!

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[eneville]

I'll always argue the merits of communication via written word. Often it wins for those using Braille readers and those who have hearing difficulties.

On the bright side, there's now a perfect excuse for not paying attention to a virtual meeting.

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[test321]

TFS says live *translated* captions. I think that's a feature that really deserves a premium for a niche case.

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[mtmra70]

Niche? That was one of the actual standout points that MS Teams had over the competition at the time. Their live translation was pretty spot on. However, Cisco Webex has quickly caught up and I think even offers more languages than Microsoft now.

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[test321]

I called it niche because it's common sense people only get invited to meetings where there is some sort of common language for people to communicate. I can make up some cases where people who don't speak a common language still have to be in the same meeting, but I can't think of a frequent scenario. Given it's not frequent, that's why it can and should be a separate subscription.

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[Tom]

You would be half wrong in that.

I've been to plenty of business meetings where the common language was English, but many participants would have greatly benefitted from a translation into their native language and it would've saved everyone a lot of time if misunderstandings and questions resulting from poor language skills could've been, let's say cut in half or something.

That people speak another language doesn't necessarily mean they wouldn't want a translation.

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[Gibgezr]

Ya, it's one of only two features (the other is built-in recording) that Teams has that makes it useful for delivering classes: I can record the lectures with live transcription, and the students who have trouble parsing what is said in the lecture can read the subtitles...and it's a feature that actually works well (unlike almost everything else about the disaster that is Teams).
Oh well, the whole point is to get schools and businesses to pay for the premium version: I predict most schools will pay for the

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[antdude]

Doesn't that violate ADA laws?

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[thegarbz]

Argh. They better not!

Why not? No one is using Teams voluntarily, and corporations are already getting the premium product.

Self host

[eneville]

Jitsi is pretty cool and can be self hosted. Works well with firefox too.

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[bustinbrains]

Did they finally fix the Firefox issues where the first person to join using Firefox caused the Jitsi server to become overburdened because the WebRTC implementation in Firefox was implemented badly? Last time I used Jitsi was back in late 2020 with the pandemic going on. Jitsi said that it wasn't their problem and Mozilla also seemed to indicate that it wasn't their problem either. With both sides saying it wasn't their problem, Jitsi users were basically hosed.

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[eneville]

Well I've not seen that personally. Maybe fixed now?

Ha ha!

[fbobraga]

#HomerSimpsonFeelings