Six months after dividing the two products across Europe to try to avoid a potential EU antitrust charge, Microsoft announced that it will offer its chat and video program Teams independently from its Office product internationally.

Highlights:

• Microsoft to offer Teams chat and video programs independently from Office internationally.
• Move follows EU antitrust concerns raised by competitor Slack.
• New offerings include standalone Teams option and Office suites without Teams; customers given until April 1st to choose.

Following a complaint by competitor workplace messaging software Slack, which is owned by Salesforce, in 2020, the European Commission began looking into Microsoft's integration of Office and Teams.

Teams, which was a free addition to Office 365 in 2017, eventually took the position of Skype for Business. Its video conferencing feature helped Teams gain popularity throughout the course of the outbreak.

However, competitors said Microsoft had an unfair advantage because the products are packaged together. On August 31 of last year, the business began selling the two products separately throughout the EU and Switzerland.

In a blog post, Microsoft announced the launch of an additional collection of commercial Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites that do not include Teams for customers in locations outside of Switzerland and the European Economic Area (EEA), as well as a new Teams standalone offering for Enterprise customers in those territories.

Customers have until April 1st to decide whether to stick with their present license agreement, renew, update, or choose one of the new options.

Office without Teams costs $7.75 to $54.75 for new commercial users, depending on the package, whereas Teams Standalone is $5.25. Based on the nation and currency, the data could change. The pricing of the company's existing packaged products were not disclosed.

According to insiders, competitors are criticizing Microsoft for the amount of fees charged and for allowing their messaging services to work with Office Web Applications in their own services. Microsoft may not be able to fend off EU antitrust accusations, which are expected to be issued to the business in the coming months, despite its unbundling efforts.

If found guilty of antitrust violations, Microsoft, which has paid 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in fines to the EU over the last ten years for linking or bundling two or more products together, may face a penalty equal to up to 10% of its yearly global revenue.