Teams Phone Adds Lower Cost Option for Frontline Workers

• Teams Phone for Frontline Workers is a new add-on for use only with Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Frontline suites.
• It offers the same PBX call management capabilities as Teams Phone Standard at a lower price, similar to other Frontline add-ons.
• The new offering could reduce the cost of providing calling in Teams for task workers, retail staff, and others targeted by Microsoft’s Frontline suites.
• Restrictions on usage scenarios for Frontline suites make them unsuitable for most traditional office workers.

Frontline suites for Microsoft 365 and Office 365 are intended for a specific category of workers—such as retail, manufacturing, or task workers—who share a device with other users and/or use a primary device with a screen smaller than 10.9″. Frontline suites provide features primarily via Web and mobile apps and offer fewer features than Enterprise suites for a considerably lower cost. Teams Phone for Frontline Workers, introduced in Feb. 2024, offers the same call management capabilities as the Teams Phone Standard add-on at half the cost of that license, but it can be applied only to Frontline suite licenses. This new add-on could reduce the cost of providing phone service through Teams to frontline workers, and customers that have already deployed Teams Phone should migrate any users with Frontline suite licenses to the new, lower-cost Teams Phone for Frontline Workers license.