Microsoft Teams Arriving for Semiannual Channel Users of Office 365 ProPlus or Office 365 Business -- Redmondmag.com

Microsoft Teams Arriving for Semiannual Channel Users of Office 365 ProPlus or Office 365 Business

By Kurt Mackie
01/10/2020

Microsoft offered a reminder on Friday that it's planning to turn on Microsoft Teams for Office 365 ProPlus or Office 365 Business tenancies that follow the semiannual channel update model starting on Jan. 14, 2020.

Unless it's blocked beforehand by IT pros, the Teams workspace collaboration application will arrive for those subscribers. The "semiannual channel" refers to Microsoft biannual update model, where feature updates typically arrive in the spring and fall. Teams will get delivered to organizations using version 1908 or later of Office 365 ProPlus, Microsoft explained, so the version of the product matters.

Organizations using Office 365 ProPlus or Office 365 Business also have an option to follow a monthly feature update model. Those subscribers already may have received Teams months ago, as Microsoft had kicked off Teams for subscribers using version 1906 of those productivity-suite products back on July 9.

Microsoft's original plans to deliver Teams to Office 365 ProPlus and Office 365 Business subscribers were described back in June. At that time, Microsoft had explained that it was delivering Teams to Office 365 Business users even though they don't have the use rights for Teams. The version of Teams that Office 365 Business users get is a free one-year trial version, which is called the "Microsoft Teams Commercial Cloud Trial." Teams gets delivered to Office 365 Business users even if they did not request getting the trial.

Blocking the arrival of Teams for these Office 365 products requires using Group Policy settings or the Office Deployment Tool, as described in this Microsoft document.

After Teams arrives, it'll start getting feature and quality updates, which will arrive "approximately every two weeks," the document explained. The Teams update process is different from the update process of other Office apps such as Excel or Word, it added.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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