Microsoft have recently released their Teams add-on Teams Premium. As an extension to the already powerful Teams platform, this add-on introduces a range of exciting capabilities and features that unify communication into the one platform. Furthermore, some previously held features of Teams Standard will be moving to Teams premium.
In this article, we take an in-depth look at Premium, equipping you with the knowledge needed to make an informed decision on integrating Teams Premium into your organisation. We’ll breakdown each of the new features, explain which standard features are moving to Premium, and answer some FAQs, helping you decide whether it’s worth the added costs.
Features Moving from Teams Standard to Teams Premium
After the general release of Teams Premium on February 1st 2023, the following standard Teams features moved to Teams Premium:
- Live Translation of Meeting Captions.
- PPT Live Chapters.
- Timeline markers in Team meeting recordings for when a user left or joined meetings.
- Custom organisation together mode scenes.
- Virtual Appointments: SMS notifications.
- Virtual Appointments: Organisational analytics in the Teams admin centre.
- Virtual Appointments: Scheduled queue view.
Teams Premium Ai Integration
One of the most exciting aspects of Microsoft’s new offering Teams Premium, is its integration of AI technology. This remarkable functionality integrates throughout the software, offering a plethora of benefits for the organisations adopting it. Its usage automates mundane tasks, optimises collaboration, and enhances the efficiency of virtual meetings. AI allows Teams Premium to incorporate features that would otherwise require third-party software, improving cost effectiveness and accessibility.
Intelligent Meeting Re-Cap
Microsoft Teams Premium leverages the same powerful OpenAI technology that powers Chat GPT to elevate the meeting experience. This is incorporated within Intelligent Meeting Re-Cap, which offers a wide range of efficiency-enhancing functionalities exclusively for Teams Premium users. Found in the ‘Recap’ tab in Teams Calendar, this feature strives to overcome common meeting challenges and boosts the productivity and impact of your organisation’s meetings.
Gone are the days of struggling to take notes while actively engaging in a meeting. With AI-generated Meeting Notes, Teams Premium automatically captures key points and meeting takeaways, allowing attendees to immerse themselves in discussion. Additionally, AI-generated Tasks analyse meeting transcripts and provides a list of actionable tasks based on what is discussed in meetings. Essentially, Intelligent Meeting Re-Cap acts as a virtual assistant, maximising the value of every meeting.
The process for reviewing and catching up on meetings also integrates AI, to become effortless in Microsoft Teams Premium. Personalised Highlights show you the exact time you joined and left a meeting and flags moments when your name is mentioned and when screens where shared. This makes it simple to efficiently navigate through the key moments of your meeting.
In the eventuality that you miss a meeting, there’s now no need to endure sitting through a full meeting recording. Thanks to the AI-generated Chapters feature, relevant sections of conversation are grouped into chapters, enabling you to effortlessly access the information which is most important to you.
Translation
Microsoft Teams Premium integrates AI to overcome a major hurdle in collaboration: language barriers. This fantastic feature enables participants to view real-time captions in their preferred language. Teams Premium now includes this functionality, that was previously only available through costly third-party software. Furthermore, to benefit from live translations, only the meeting organiser needs to have Teams Premium, allowing you to extend this advantage to your external clients, customers, and colleagues.
Improved Customisation in Teams Premium
Custom Meeting Templates
Meeting requirements can vary depending on their scale, sensitivity, and desired level of formality. In the regular Teams, due to its time-consuming nature, users often neglect to customise meeting settings and accommodate for these nuances. Teams Premium addresses this challenge with customised meeting templates.
These templates grant administrators precise control over meeting configuration, allowing for consistent and standardised meeting experiences across your organisation. Compliance managers will find this feature especially valuable as it enables them to effortlessly enforce compliance requirements and business rules. Furthermore, meeting organisers can lock template settings to prevent changes or leave them unlocked for customisation at will.
Custom User Policy Packages
Different departments within your organisation will use virtual meetings to serve a number of varying purposes. To address the complexity and time-consuming nature of assigning and adhering to meeting policies at an individual basis, Teams Premium introduces Custom User Policy Packages.
These packages, created through Teams Admin Centre, allow IT admins to develop customised policy bundles for users within the same departments or with similar virtual meeting requirements. This solution streamlines the process and saves valuable time for your organisation, offering a more efficient approach to managing virtual meetings.
Teams Branding
Microsoft recognises the significance of embodying company brand and culture in all aspects of an organisation. With Teams Premium, they provide the means to extend this embodiment to virtual meetings. Custom branding empowers organisations to personalise their meeting experiences, ensuring their company identity shines throughout. Accessed through Custom Meeting Policies, IT administrators can manage custom branding, allowing your logo and colours to take centre stage in meeting pre-join, lobby, and in-meeting interactions.
Virtual Appointments in Teams Premium
Teams Premium offers enhanced connectivity and virtual engagement with external clients and customers. The management of end-to-end customer meeting experience has seen significant improvements with Virtual Appointments.
External attendees can join custom-branded virtual lobbies pre-meeting, without the need to download the app, via text and email invitations. These lobbies come with two-way lobby chat integrated, enabling you to interact with clients prior to your B2C meetings.
Premium has streamlined the process for scheduling meetings and appointment queuing, enabling full management from a single location. This eliminates the need for costly third-party software to do so. Furthermore, you can easily track wait times and no-show rates using built-in department and organisational-level analytics.
Improved Security
To ensure the ability to follow compliance requirements and the protection of sensitive information, Teams Premium incorporates a range of features to enhance the security of virtual meetings. The Advanced Meeting Protection features offer additional security measures such as restricting recording permissions and using watermarks to discourage leaks, in the effort to preserve the confidentiality of your discussions.
For highly confidential meetings, you can further enhance security, disabling some of the core meeting features, for an advanced encryption option. This end-to-end encryption elevates security from the industry standard encryption provided in the regular Teams. These security features seamlessly integrate with Custom User Policy Packages, providing an extra layer of protection while maintaining a quick and easy meeting setup process.
Teams Premium Webinars
To centralise all of organisation’s internal and customer-facing video communications, Teams Premium allows for webinar hosting, removing the need for third-party software. These webinars are highly customisable, providing seamless integration of branding while meeting the requirements for various purposes such as internal training, product demonstrations, and external marketing.
Teams Premium webinars provide similar capabilities to other industry standard webinar hosting platforms. Organisers can conduct test-runs and briefings, pre-webinar, without impacting the experience of attendees. Furthermore, presenters can utilise chat and Q&A features to engage with attendees in waiting rooms.
Premium’s webinar management features allow for bespoke webinar experiences from registration to deployment. The webinar registration process can be managed entirely within Teams Premium, with the ability to create registration waitlists, to conduct manual approval, and to adapt flexible registration start and end times. Automated email reminders can also be set up within Premium for added convenience. What attendees and presenters can see during webinars can also be fully customised, while external media feeds such as video and screen sharing can be easily integrated using its RTMP-in capabilities.
FAQ
Teams Premium vs Standard, what’s the difference?
Teams Premium builds on the familiar features of the standard Teams with additional features such as integrated AI, improved customisation, enhanced security, virtual appointments, and webinar capabilities.
Will Teams Premium be included within E3 or E5 licenses?
Microsoft Teams Premium is not included in either E3 or E5 licenses. It can be obtained separately as a Teams add-on, improving the Teams experience for an added cost.
For more information see: Microsoft Teams Premium Licensing
How much will Teams Premium cost?
At the time of writing Microsoft Premium can be bought for £5.80 per user monthly, although this main fluctuate as more features are added. You can currently receive a 30 day free trial of Teams Premium through the Microsoft 365 admin centre for up to 25 users within your organisation.
Is Teams Premium Connected with Chat GPT?
Although not directly connected to ChatGPT, the AI capabilities in Teams Premium utilises the same powerful Large Language Models and OpenAI technology that powers ChatGPT.
