Advertised as "a solution to launch and scale your freelance workforce," Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit is the result of Microsoft's collaboration with Upwork, a global freelancing platform with more than 12 million registered freelancers and over five million clients. The 3 million jobs posted annually have a value of over US$1 billion, making Upwork one of the largest services of its kind, alongside Fiverr.
According to Upwork, even Microsoft is a client of its services and, during the past year, the Redmond giant has completed more than 2,000 projects on the platform. These projects that include writing, research, video editing, translation, design, and data science were used by 25 internal teams and hundreds of Microsoft employees.
Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit includes more than just a few apps. As described by Microsoft, this is "a curated set of tools, templates, and best practices to help our customers launch, execute, and manage freelance programs at scale." This solution provides tools for internal communication and awareness, team-wide collaboration, data analytics, and workflow automation.
To get started, there is no need for additional payments, so any existing Office 365 Enterprise or Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscribers can start using the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit right away.