Microsoft has launched a personal version of Microsoft Teams. You can use it with friends and family.
It is a free consumer version of Teams, which is more or less identical to the software for business applications. With the app, you can chat, make video calls and share calendars, locations and files. The service was rolled out as a preview on iOS and Android a year ago.
Now that the app is out of beta, you can use it in your browser, mobile, and desktop. It also appears that Microsoft is keeping the free video calling it introduced in the preview. That means that you can currently have a video call with up to 300 people for 24 hours.
After the pandemic, there could be a limit of 60 minutes and a hundred people, which is slightly more in line with, for example, the limits on the free version of Zoom (with which you can video call for a maximum of 40 minutes). One-on-one conversations would still be possible in Teams for up to 24 hours.
The expansion raises the question of what will happen next with Skype. That chat service still exists and was more or less classified by Microsoft as the consumer service compared to Teams’ business app. Microsoft itself said last year that it is ‘fully committed to continuing to support Skype, but with the emergence of alternatives such as Zoom and Jitsi, the app has lost a lot of its feathers.
It looks like Microsoft is now looking to reclaim some of that audience with free Teams after more than a year of lockdowns. The app can be found on Microsoft’s site, where you can download it or open it in the browser.
