The new licenses are designed to give you one license to manage when you want to give users the full experience and all the capabilities and reduce the cost too. The standalone licenses will continue to be available so if you want to purchase Audio Conferencing on its own for a user who only needs conferencing but no phone system that’s not a problem. The difference between then and now is that previously this was comprised of multiple standalone products. Voice calling has always been available in Skype for Business Online and Microsoft Teams. That may be cheap compared to the cost of running and operating your own phone system, SIP trunks, and more, but still. The cost can also add up.Īt standard retail rates, excluding VAT, the cost for the three licenses based on a 120-minute Domestic Calling Plan is £19.50 per month per user.
One license to rule them allĪs you see above, with the three separate components this can be something to manage unless you get fancy with Azure AD Group-based License Assignment. Communication Credits can be topped up manually or automatically and there are thresholds you can set-up to manage the spending too. Much like your mobile phone contract, when you run out of minutes, you pay for the extra calls. When you run out of minutes or calls are made to numbers not included in your Calling Plan then these are billed with Communication Credits. This is ideal for businesses because it means you can offset intensive phone users against lighter phone users to get the pool size you need. Minutes are pooled across the organisation: if one user uses only 60 minutes but another users 180 then the overage of 60 minutes from the heavy user gets drawn from the light users’ allocation. Plans come in different sizes with the smallest being 120 minutes. Domestic plans include minutes for your local country whereas International plans include local and international minutes. A Calling Plan is either a Domestic plan or an International plan. This is arguably the most complex element of Microsoft 365 Enterprise Voice.Įach user that needs one gets assigned a Calling Plan. The Calling Plan license component is what enables you to make outgoing calls. Once a user is assigned a Phone System license they can be assigned a telephone number and receive incoming calls. The Phone System license is what enables the PBX functionality for Microsoft Teams. Perfect for people on the move or otherwise unable to access a Microsoft Teams client. Once an Audio Conferencing license is assigned to a user, their meeting invites are appended with a telephone number for phone users to dial in. To get that, you need the Audio Conferencing license. If you want people to be able to dial-in from a telephone they need a number and a meeting ID. When you set-up a Microsoft Teams meeting your invite has a join link. Audio ConferencingĪudio Conferencing for Microsoft Teams is a standout in that it’s not dependant on the other components. To break down the voice elements in Microsoft 365, there are three components to the licensing. The reasons given by Microsoft were a bit ambiguous but if we had to give an opinion, it was likely because carriers providing Direct Routing and SIP Trunk services complained that this would cut them out of the Microsoft Teams market too much.
#PURCHASE MICROSOFT OFFICE FOR ENTERPRISE FREE#
UPDATE: We’re going to leave this post live for prosperity, however, before the free calling plans went live, they got pulled. Microsoft 365 Enterprise Voice Plans are here to simplify things and hopefully make them cheaper too. If you’ve come from a Skype for Business background, this is the same as the choice between PC-to-PC calling and Enterprise Voice. Without these voice elements, Microsoft Teams users are only able to perform Teams-to-Teams calls. If you want to be able to give users the ability to make and take phone calls to non-Teams users then you need to enable voice elements of the service.
Whether it be one-to-one or many-to-many, people talk.