2020, and was still promoting that offer in 2021. Microsoft had offered a one-year free trial of Audio Conferencing to Teams users back in Sept. It's conceived as a perk for those occasions when people might be on the road and without the bandwidth for a Teams session.
This Audio Conferencing feature addition will arrive "over the next few months" for users of the "enterprise, business, frontline and government suites," Microsoft indicated.Īudio Conferencing is a feature just for people who start meetings. Microsoft will add Audio Conferencing with "unlimited dial-in capabilities" to more subscription plans than just the current Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5 plans. Microsoft's price hike announcement also described plan changes with respect to the Teams Audio Conferencing capability. Perpetual licensees buy the product once instead of subscribing, and they don't get the new features that the subscription-based licensees receive. Microsoft previously announced back in February that users of the "perpetual-license" Office products (Office Professional Plus, Office Standard and individual apps) would get a 10 percent price hike with the next product release, along with a cut in product support by five years.
The price increase was described as "the first substantive pricing update since we launched Office 365 a decade ago." Microsoft had added 24 apps since launch, along with 1,400 new features.
Here are the specific cost increases coming in March for Office 365 and Microsoft 365 business subscribers: Microsoft said in its announcement it isn't changing the costs for education and consumer products users "at this time." Only business subscribers will be affected by this round of price increases.