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Users Can Sign Up for Sixty Day Teams Premium Trial License
Is MSCommerce (the “PowerShell Module for accessing Microsoft Commerce APIs”) the worse PowerShell module produced by Microsoft? The thought went through my mind when I loaded version 1.9 of the module (the latest available from the PowerShell gallery, updated a mere 25 days ago) to find that not only did the module not support PowerShell 7, but it barely worked on PowerShell 5.
Well, barely rates the module too highly. Yes, the cmdlets generate output, but it’s odd output that’s not pipeable and is barely usable. So MSCommerce 1.9 is a terrible module, which is why I deleted it and went back to version 1.8 to work with the Teams Premium Trial offer that Microsoft is keen to offer to end users. For the record, I used these commands:
Uninstall-Module Mscommerce Install-Module Mscommerce -RequiredVersion 1.8 -Scope AllUsers
Teams Premium Trial
According to MC670435 (24 Aug 2023), in late September, end users in commercial tenants “will be able to initiate a self-service trial of Microsoft Teams Premium using their Azure Active Directory (AAD) credentials with no requirement to input payment information.” In other words, users can decide to kick the tires for Teams Premium for sixty days to see if it’s worth the $10 monthly fee (available for $7/month until December 31, 2023). These licenses are different to the 30-day trial licenses available for 25 users within a tenant.
Microsoft hopes that the trial will “generate signals on utilization for IT to identify users that would benefit from a Teams Premium license.”
Tenant administrators can terminate the trial licenses at any time (or remove them from user accounts). At the end of the sixty-day trial period, the organization can decide to drop the trial or move to a paid basis by buying some “real” Teams Premium licenses. More information about administration of self-service purchases is available in Microsoft documentation.
The Worth of Teams Premium
Microsoft announced Teams Premium at the Ignite 2022 conference. Annoyingly, Microsoft followed up the announcement by moving four features from Teams Standard to Teams Premium. In July 2023, Microsoft said that they had sold 600,000 Teams Premium licenses, which sounds a lot until you remember it’s only 0.2% of the 300 million Teams monthly active user base. Microsoft is obviously very keen to increase the $72 million annual run rate for Teams Premium to a much higher number, which is why trials are available.
I quite like some of the Teams Premium features, the best being intelligent recap of meetings. However, deciding if Teams Standard is sufficient for your day-to-day team collaboration or you need the extra boost delivered by Teams Premium is highly subjective.
Managing Self-Service Purchases
Microsoft started selling self-service purchases to end users with Power BI Premium in 2021. Since that time, it has steadily increased the number of available products, such as the Windows 365 plans. A more recent addition is the Python in Excel add-on, announced in MC669648 on August 22, 2023. Many organizations don’t want users do purchase software, and that’s where the MsCommerce module comes into play. If you want to stop users seeing a product, you must disable it in the MsCommerce inventory.
For example, to block purchases of the Teams Premium trial, import the module, connect to the MsCommerce endpoint and run the Get-MsCommerceProductPolicies cmdlet to find the Teams Premium trial. Then set the Enabled state to False. Here’s what I did:
Import-Module MsCommerce
Connect-MsCommerce
Get-MSCommerceProductPolicies -PolicyId AllowSelfServicePurchase | Where-Object {$_.ProductName -eq "Teams Premium" }| ForEach {Update-MSCommerceProductPolicy -PolicyId AllowSelfServicePurchase -ProductId $_.ProductId -Enabled $False }
Update policy product success
ProductName ProductId PolicyId PolicyValue
----------- --------- -------- -----------
Teams Premium CFQ7TTC0RM8K AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Success
To list the full set of self-service products available to users and their current state, run this command:
Get-MSCommerceProductPolicies -PolicyId AllowSelfServicePurchase | Sort-Object ProductName ProductName ProductId PolicyId PolicyValue ----------- --------- -------- ----------- Dynamics 365 Marketing CFQ7TTC0LH3N AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled Dynamics 365 Marketing Additional Application CFQ7TTC0LHVK AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled Dynamics 365 Marketing Additional Non-Prod Application CFQ7TTC0LHWM AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled Dynamics 365 Marketing Attach CFQ7TTC0LHWP AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled Microsoft 365 F3 CFQ7TTC0LH05 AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled Power Apps per user CFQ7TTC0LH2H AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Power Automate per user CFQ7TTC0LH3L AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Power Automate Per User with Attended RPA Plan CFQ7TTC0LSGZ AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled Power Automate RPA CFQ7TTC0KXG6 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Power BI Premium per user CFQ7TTC0H6RP AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Power BI Pro CFQ7TTC0H9MP AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Project Plan 1 CFQ7TTC0HDB1 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Project Plan 3 CFQ7TTC0HDB0 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Python On Excel CFQ7TTC0S3X1 AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled Teams Exploratory CFQ7TTC0J1FV AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled Teams Premium CFQ7TTC0RM8K AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Visio Plan 1 CFQ7TTC0HD33 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Visio Plan 2 CFQ7TTC0HD32 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Viva Goals CFQ7TTC0PW0V AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled Viva Learning CFQ7TTC0HVZG AllowSelfServicePurchase Enabled Windows 365 Business CFQ7TTC0J203 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Windows 365 Business with Windows Hybrid Benefit CFQ7TTC0HX99 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled Windows 365 Enterprise CFQ7TTC0HHS9 AllowSelfServicePurchase Disabled
Teams Premium Needs a Comprehensive Trial
If an organization is interested in Teams Premium, I recommend that you run a planned trial by selecting a department to test and assigning trial licenses to 25 people to use over 30 days. I don’t see much value in individual users getting trial licenses to test on their own. Teams is all about collaboration, and collaboration involves multiple people. Taking that logic further, it seems like the right approach is to test as a team and not as an individual.
So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across Office 365. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.