Tag Archives: Microsoft Places

Teams and Places licensing changes

Microsoft have announced a raft of Teams licensing changes, coming on 1 April, 2026.

The first is for Places, the app that helps you to find the right space to work in when you’re in the office. It’s got a set of core features found in most licences that include Teams, and premium features previously found (suitably) only in Teams Premium. Two of these features, Places Finder and Places Explorer give you some nice additional features to make it easy to choose and book the right desk, room, or other space, and they’ll be incorporated into all licences that include Teams and Outlook calendar access.

Secondly, there are changes to the Teams Shared Devices licence, which is currently used to license shared devices such as common area phones, Teams Panels, and hotdesking devices. That won’t change, but the name will – it’ll be a Teams Shared Space licence – and it will also be used to manage shared desks, where a single licence will give rights to manage four desks. Note that existing Teams Shared Devices licence customers will need to acquire an additional free licence to enable this additional functionality.

Finally, Town Hall and its advanced large-scale events and webinar features will move from Teams Premium to Teams Enterprise. Along with this change, the attendee allowance in Teams Enterprise is increasing from 1,000 to 3,000 with up to 10,000 in view-only mode. There will also be new Attendee Capacity Pack licences, which will allow customers to further scale view-only attendance from 10,000 up to 100,000 participants.

Find all the details here: https://bit.ly/4qQP6wR, and a useful FAQ here: https://bit.ly/4bs0g6o.

GA of Microsoft Places

Microsoft announce that Microsoft Places is now generally available. This new technology is based on Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot and is designed to help users have a better experience when they’re working from their office – by making it easy to coordinate in-person gatherings or to sync up spontaneously with colleagues also working from the office on a particular day. From a licensing perspective there are three tiers of features: core, enhanced, and additional. If you’ve got Microsoft 365 Business Basic/Standard/Premium, Office 365 F3/E1/E3/E5 or Microsoft 365 F3/E3/E5 licence then you have access to the core features, although you’ll also need a Teams licence if it’s not included in your plan. The enhanced features are available through a Teams Premium Add-on licence, and the additional features need a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence too.

You can find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4eIoUgX with lots of visionary information as to what Places might do for you, and the more pragmatic Learn documentation here: https://bit.ly/4i3m8ph.