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Microsoft recently announced that it willretire the current free version of Teamson April 12, 2023.
There are several options available, but they already require some form of monthly payment.
In March 2020, I wrote about howMicrosoft Teams changed my football team during the pandemic.
We used the platform for virtual classrooms and communication for years.
Microsoft won’t even support mixing paid and free users.
Neither of those are tenable.
But my team has already used the soon-to-be-retired free version of Teams.
That means there are years of messages, meetings, and files stored there.
When Microsoft Teams Free (classic) is retired, all of our data goes away.
As far as I can tell, theTeams Export APIthat lets you bulk export messages requires a paid license.
Microsoft clearly has the technical capabilities to keep the data.
It’s doing just that for anyone that pays to upgrade to a paid license.
The company’s decision-makers have just decided that free users don’t get that privilege.
I suppose I could, but I’m nervous about what will happen in the future.
If I start with this new version of Teams, will Microsoft pull a similar move in the future?
