Microsoft Teams without an Office 365 license

Now with all this Working from Home going on you might want to use Teams, even if you don’t have a valid Office 365 license that contains the Teams software. For this Microsoft has introduced the Microsoft Teams Exploratory license. This Exploratory license replaces the previous Microsoft Commercial Cloud Trial.

When a user without a (Teams) license logs on for the first time to Teams via https://teams.microsoft.com he must login (of course) and the standard logon screen is shown:

When logged on for a couple of seconds a license error is shown, and a minute later the user is successfully logged on to Teams, “without” a license:

Teams first time

I have written “without” in quotes, when you navigate to the license portal you will see that the Microsoft Exploratory License is added and one license is (automatically) assigned:

Teams Exploratory License

This one user is the user that was logged in to Teams in the previous step.

The Microsoft Teams Exploratory License is for users to self-assign a license the first time they logon to the service. Typically, this self-assign option is enabled in your tenant, but that might not always be the case. Check the Office 365 admin portal and select Settings | Org settings | User owned apps and services:

User owned apps and services

Open this and check if the Let users access the Office Store and Let users install trial apps and services are checked. Of course, if you do not want your users to do this, uncheck the options.

But besides the Microsoft Teams license, there’s a lot more in the Exploratory license, like an Exchange Online P1, Forms, Planner, Stream etc. available in this license:

Teams Exploratory License Apps

The Microsoft Teams Exploratory license is available at no cost until your renewal on or after January 2021. So, at the time of writing this is at least 7 months away.

Of course you can also integrate the Teams license with an on-premises Exchange 2016 environment, for this please check my previous blogpost Microsoft Teams and Exchange 2016.