The Year with Microsoft Teams: It is Not Getting Easier

More features brings more complexity and a need to change how we manage.

As 2024 draws to a close, it is worth reflecting on the fact that Microsoft Teams has now been available for seven and a half years, having been launched worldwide on March 14, 2017. (This is either a short or long period of time depending on your perspective.)

Overall, each year with Microsoft Teams has seen more users, more features, more licenses, and more complexity.

Teams is Successful

Teams has certainly been successful, and provides many organizations with strong communication, collaboration, and workflow capabilities, as witnessed by…

• 320 million monthly active Teams users

• 20 million monthly active PSTN users

• 3 million Teams Premium users

• >1 million Teams Rooms

The Teams “universe” currently looks like this (as of October 2024):

320 million monthly active Teams users is indeed a big and impressive number.

However, despite a huge “push” from Microsoft, Teams Phone, as a replacement voice system (PBX), appears to be an underutilized capability, with only 6% of active Teams users taking advantage of this robust capability.

An additional 24 million users have unused licensing for Teams Phone via their E5 license. An estimated 60 million users in total are licensed for Teams Phone, 44 million as part of their E5 bundle and an estimated 16 million additional Teams Phone license purchases, most often as an add-on to an E3 license. Certainly, an opportunity in 2025 for organizations and Microsoft partners.

To get to the current state, Teams growth has been explosive, but is leveling off, granted at an impressively high level.

Teams is Powerful and Keeps Adding Features

Over the past years Teams has grown more powerful, with hundreds of features added each year.

2024 was no exception to this trend. Recently, Microsoft introduced a new chat and channels experience that was described by many as one of the biggest changes to Teams ever.

The new chat and channel experience works well, even with lots of channels it displays quickly and allows you to easily monitor unread messages. The numerous configuration options might be overwhelming to some users and different modes of displaying the same information can make helping a user more difficult; giving instructions on what to click on depend on their configuration choices.

At Microsoft Ignite (week of November 18, 2024) additional Teams features were announced:

• Multilingual meeting transcripts

• Translation for intelligent meeting recaps

• Microsoft Places which helps better manage hybrid work scenarios

• Storyline integration into Teams (previously part of Viva Engage)

Of course, lots of new Copilot features which extend Teams were also announced, including:

• The ability for Copilot to analyze content presented in Teams and reason over shared content

• Copilot will now give quick summaries for files shared in a Teams chat

• Copilot Pages which provides persistent results for prompt results from BizChat (aka Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat). Pages can be shared and co-authored.

• A Copilot Interpreter agent that provides real-time language translation during a meeting. Participants can choose to have the Interpreter simulate their own voice.

• A Copilot meeting Facilitator agent that will take real-time summary notes that can be co-authored with meeting participants

• An Employee Self-Service agent that can provide answers and take actions related to common HR and IT scenarios from within Teams BizChat

While the addition of new features to Teams is welcomed by power users, there is starting to be increasing “rumblings” from standard users related to the seemingly incessant UI changes Microsoft is making.

Administration and Support of Teams

With most new Teams features, options, or capabilities there is a need for a system admin to understand and configure who gets what option. Many options have security, compliance, data residency, and/or licensing implications.

New features also require that the Teams Admin Center (TAC) continues to evolve or additions to the PowerShell scripting language are needed. Keeping up with both options, as hundreds of new features are added, can be challenging for IT Pros.

With more complex configurations, and potentially many different sets of options for different user groups, diagnosing problems becomes more complex.

Licensing is Complex and Getting More Expensive

In the beginning Teams was included as part of Office 365 (and M365 licenses), now there are business and enterprise plans where Teams has been “unbundled” from Microsoft 365.

In addition, there are multiple add-ons to Teams, including Teams Premium ($7/user/month), Teams Phone (included with E5, otherwise $8+/user/month), Copilot ($30/user/month), and Teams Rooms Pro ($40/room/month).

A full enterprise plan comparison chart is available here.

Microsoft also recently announced that Teams Phone licenses will increase in cost in 2025, going from $8+/user/month to $10+/user/month. Monthly billing annual plans will all now have a 5% price increase (as compared to upfront paid annual plans).

Teams Management Options

Throughout 2024, I have had numerous discussions with many individuals at VOSS focused on their approach to simplifying some of the above noted challenges with Teams.

Here are some of my key takeaways from these discussions.

VOSS Automate is designed to simplify the administration of Teams, and also can provide a “single pane of glass” if you need to manage both Teams and other systems (e.g. Cisco). I’ve seen examples where VOSS:

• Insulates admins from needing to deal with finicky scripting

• Can be used to automate multiple systems and multi-step processes

• Allows you to delegate capabilities based on office location, or any other logical grouping

• Can present a simplified user interface, with limited options, to first-tier support workers

• Can help standardize sets of configuration options applied to users

• Provides a complete audit trail (and supports rollback in case a change has an unintended effect)

VOSS Insights extends the built-in Teams reporting to provide a unified view across multiple systems. I wrote recently that Teams reporting is improving but there are still gaps. Cost and license optimization is an area where organizations often use VOSS Insights.

Taming Teams

At the end of 2024, organizations looking to fully leverage Teams in 2025 need to:

1. Provide adequate initial and on-going training for end-users (This includes establishing a process for keeping up to date on new features and how these might be integrated to improve your business processes)

2. Analyze and optimize Teams and add-on licenses (Copilot, Teams Premium, Teams Room Pro)

3. Ensure IT has the time and inclination to keep up with management and configuration changes within Teams Admin Center and O365 Admin Center (This may involve considering third-party tools to simplify management and reporting)

4. Leverage built-in tools and reports (and potentially third-party tools) to monitor, manage, and operate your Teams environment efficiently and effectively

If you work for a large enterprise organization, do you have the same impression as me? In 2024 did you see Teams get more powerful, more complex, neither or both? I would love to hear your thoughts.