Tag Archives: Teams Panels

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.

Teams Shared Device licence

Microsoft announce that the existing Common Area Phone licence will be rebranded to the Teams Shared Device licence to enable more scenarios involving shared devices. This licence will still be used for Teams Phones deployed in shared areas, but will also be used to support a hotdesking experience on a Teams Display, and for a standalone Teams Panel not tied to a Microsoft Teams Room.

Find the announcement here: http://bit.ly/3TZLk2I.

Changes to Teams Rooms licensing

Microsoft update the licensing for Teams Rooms from 1 September, 2022. Previously there were Teams Rooms Standard and Teams Rooms Premium licences costing $15 and $50 per device per month respectively, with the biggest difference between the SKUs being the Microsoft managed services element.

Now there’s a choice of Teams Rooms Basic or Teams Rooms Pro. Teams Rooms Basic is a free SKU, with a basic set of features, which customers can use for up to 25 devices. Teams Rooms Pro is $40 per room per month with the whole feature set including support for Teams Panels and dual screens. Note also that the Microsoft managed services element is being removed to enable partners to provide complete services around meeting room management, supported by AI services.

For more details, and links to further information, this Microsoft blog post is a great place to start: https://bit.ly/3BjtJeS. If you want a summary of the latest Teams Rooms hardware innovation, then this is a useful page: https://bit.ly/3CKVKwW, and there’s a note at the bottom indicating that there’ll be a further Teams Shared Device licence in a few months to cover certain use cases on Teams Displays and Teams Panels.