What is Microsoft Teams Premium, and what are the benefits?

What is Microsoft Teams Premium

Microsoft Teams Premium is a Teams add-on license that allows organizations with Microsoft 365 subscriptions to enhance their Teams experience with benefits like:

• Easily create meetings that meet your specific needs.
• Use the power of AI to focus on what matters in every meeting.
• Help keep confidential meetings more secure
• Advanced management and reporting capabilities for IT.
• Advanced Virtual Appointments.

Microsoft Teams Premium is built on the familiar Teams experience. It helps you make every meeting more personalized, intelligent and secure. Quickly discover the meeting insights that matter most to you. Even if you missed the meeting, get the right online meeting setup as easily as picking the right meeting spot.

Elevate webinar experiences for any audience, whether you’re creating new connections or generating leads. Make virtual appointments with customers as easy and personalized as if you were together in person and collaborate with confidence, knowing that confidential information is protected with additional controls like watermarking.

Personalized: Easily create meetings that meet your needs

Meetings are not one size fits all. You wouldn’t go to a coffee shop for a confidential meeting or an auditorium for a one-on-one. Today, when you schedule an online meeting, you just use the default settings because drilling into meeting options takes valuable time out of your day.

The all-new meeting guides in Teams Premium help you to automatically create the experience that’s right for your meeting. The guide is easily customized and managed by IT. You can select a meeting guide like a client call, brainstorming meeting, or help desk call and the options will already be set, reducing the time and thought process around getting the meeting right. And with guides, leaders can rest assured that that meetings adhere to company best practices and policies.

With Teams Premium, you can infuse customized meeting branding into the meeting lobby and create custom backgrounds and together modes for employees to enjoy and IT to manage, to never compromise your brand.

Intelligent: Focus on what matters with AI-powered meetings

Integrating ChatGPT with Microsoft Teams allows users to interact with the AI model through the platform, enabling them to access information, complete tasks, and automate processes, all within the Teams environment. This integration provides a seamless and efficient way for users to access AI capabilities, helping to improve productivity and collaboration within organizations.

Until a few weeks, you could integrate ChatGPT into Microsoft Teams by creating an account with OpenAI, obtaining an API key and building some custom flows with Power Automate. On February 1^st Microsoft have announced they’re including some native integration of OpenAI’s latest technologies, including Large Language Models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, to make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and protected. That includes one-on-ones, large meetings, virtual appointments and webinars. The news comes as OpenAI launches its own ChatGPT premium plan and a new report revealed the tool had 100 million monthly active users in January, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.

Microsoft Teams helps your users to quickly catch up on meetings, whether they are unable to attend or need a quick refresher. With intelligent recap, they’ll see a personalized snapshot with insights to help them discover information that matters most to them. It uses AI to assign tasks and provides context for how the task was captured.

This helps ensure action items and follow ups aren’t missed, your users can accept the task directly in meeting recap or even during the meeting when the task is first identified and proposed.

It’s like having a virtual assistant attend every meeting. Your users can easily navigate meeting recordings with auto generated chapters to help themunderstand the content of a meeting discussion and lets them easily jump to important topics to save time. In the coming months, Microsoft will be releasing key points and takeaways after the meeting, with AI-generated notes automatically created and powered by GPT-3.5. Your users would then be enabled to follow-up easyly with AI-generated tasks and action items automatically suggested for them.

Meeting recordings will automatically call out key moments, such as when the user’s name was mentioned, a screen was shared, and when you left the meeting, making it easy to jump back to that moment and get caught up on what the user missed at the end of the meeting.

Searching transcripts is also becoming more intelligent, with suggested speakers that are personalized per user to quickly search for specific moments in the recording. Your Teams Premium users can also easily share a link from a particular timestamp or a chapter of the recording, making it easy to collaborate with related stakeholders who weren’t in the meeting.

AI-generated chapters for PowerPoint Live and personalized timeline markers for when your users leave and join a meeting are available today. The additional intelligent recap capabilities will be available in the second quarter of 2023.

Meeting information will be personally curated for you and shared across Microsoft 365 products such as Viva daily briefing emails, Microsoft Feed, Outlook, and in Teams.

Online meetings allow more people than ever before to connect. Currently, in Teams meetings, your users can easily follow along with who’s saying what with speaker-attributed live captions and transcription. But if a user is presenting to people who don’t speak the same language, how do they make sure the conversation is seamless? Live translation for captions delivers AI-powered, real-time translations from 40 spoken languages so meeting participants can read captions in their own language. If an organizer has Teams Premium, all meeting attendees can benefit from the live translated captions. This helps break down language barriers for your global meetings and calls to be productive and effortless.

Secure: Keep meetings confidential

When you need to set up a new meeting, it’s simple—create a new Teams meeting and send the invite, right? But the reality is, some meetings contain business-sensitive information that is screen-shared or covered in the conversation. Board meetings, financial discussions, and undisclosed product launch reviews are examples that likely need added security to help ensure that content remains protected.

With advanced meeting protection in Teams Premium, you can now safeguard confidential meetings. With new meeting options like watermarking to deter leaks and limiting who can record, you get additional protections to keep the discussion private. And for Microsoft 365 E5 customers with the most advanced security requirements, you can leverage your existing Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels to apply relevant meeting options automatically. That makes setting up protected meetings even easier—simply select one of the familiar sensitivity labels you’re already using to protect sensitive data across Microsoft 365 and let the automation take over. Compliance admins can edit their existing labels in the Security and Compliance Center to enforce the meeting options that should be applied when the label is used in a meeting.

Advanced Virtual Appointments

While connecting virtually with your customers, clients and patients may have started as a necessity, it’s now an opportunity to engage with customers in new ways and to grow your business.

With Virtual Appointments capabilities available today in Microsoft 365 offerings, your employees can easily schedule appointments and customers can join in a mobile browser no need to download an app. And with Teams Premium, you get advanced Virtual Appointments to manage the end-to-end appointment experience.

Delight clients

Attendees may lack the technical know-how to successfully join a virtual meeting, or face log-in problems not to mention simple forgetfulness to join an appointment in the first place. With Teams Premium, facilitate a seamless customer experience that allows your customers to receive text reminders and join custom branded virtual appointments through their mobile devices without downloading Teams.

Users are getting an SMS notification that enables easy joining the virtual appointment through a mobile web browser and enter a custom waiting room before their appointment is ready.

Streamline appointment management

Schedulers can lack a unified place to manage appointments or wrestle with nonintegrated platforms. With Teams Premium, appointment schedulers can set up and manage scheduled and on-demand virtual appointments in one location with advanced capabilities like appointment queuing.

The Virtual Appointments app provides a dashboard for a quick view into schedules, queues, and analytics and tabs to deep dive into bookings schedule, queue view, analytics, and more.

Advanced Webinars

And in today’s world of constant communications and distractions, it’s hard to stand out to attract and engage attendees, whether it’s employees in your organization or potential customers for generating new business.

Building upon the basic webinar functionality available in Office 365 and Microsoft 365 offerings registration up to one thousand attendees, co-organizer role, interactivity with Q&A, attendee reporting, and Dynamics 365 marketing integration with Advanced Webinars in Teams Premium, you get the familiar and secure experience of Teams combined with new host controls and event management controls that make it seamless to connect with any audience. Whether you are promoting a new product, onboarding and training new team members, or connecting with potential leads to grow your business, Advanced Webinars deliver a high-quality experience to help you before and during your event.

Building upon the basic webinar capabilities in Teams today, the registration experience is getting even better in Teams Premium with registration waitlist and manual approval. Enabling the waitlist will keep webinar registration open even after the event has reached the capacity set by the organizer. This allows additional people to register and be automatically added to the waitlist. As new spots open, people will be automatically moved to the pending approval state, which enables the organizer to review their registration information and manually approve or reject each of the registrants. In addition, you can customize the registration start and end time to specify when you want registration to start and end, making it easier to plan for and manage your event.

To build excitement and attract attendees to your webinar, you can send automated reminder emails ahead of the event. These emails will be sent to every confirmed registrant on the day of the event and will include a custom-branded header, webinar details, and a link to join the event.

Like when you used to gather with the host and presenters in the physical green room ahead of your event, you will be able to connect and manage all the behind-the-scenes action in the virtual green room. Join with the host and other presenters in a dedicated space separate from attendees, where you can socialize, monitor chat and Q&A, manage attendee settings, and review content before the event starts. And as attendees wait, they will be greeted with a welcome screen and can use chat and Q&A to engage with presenters and each other.

Key differences between Teams and Teams Premium

Microsoft Teams Room Pro

The workplace of the future will accommodate hybrid scenarios in which some people may work from the office while others may work remotely, or some fluid combination of the two. Organizations will need meeting rooms that serve as hubs for hybrid work. Effective meeting room experiences enable users to start or join a meeting quickly for maximum productivity. Proactive management, real-time monitoring, and remediation keep rooms functional, up-to-date, and secure.

Microsoft Teams Rooms Premium is built on the Microsoft Teams Rooms Basic experience and management capabilities available from the Teams Admin Center by combining intelligent software, dedicated experts, and enhanced insights from across organizations to continuously improve the meeting room experience.

Some of the benefits of Microsoft Teams Room Premium:

• 24/7 Intelligent operations: Around-the-clock software and machine learning to automate updates, detect and manage incidents, and scale rooms efficiently.
• Quality Experts: A team of experts provide 24×7 service operations, tiered support, and incident resolution assistance.
• Insights: Benefit from rich analytics, reporting, and proven learnings at scale across many customers.

Conclusion

General availability of Teams Premium is just around the corner, scheduled for early February 2023. Features in intelligent recap will begin rolling out in in the first half of 2023. Beginning February 2023, customers with existing Microsoft 365 plans can purchase Teams Premium as an add-on to their existing Microsoft 365 services.

The following features will move to Teams Premium, and will be still open for everyone for a grace period, after which the users would need to switch to Teams Premium, or will loose the features:

• Live translation of captions – available to all until 60 days after Teams Premium General availability.
• Custom together mode scenes – available to all until 30 days after Teams Premium General availability.
• Timeline markers in Teams meetings recordings (join/leave meetings)- available to all until 30 days after Teams Premium General availability.
• Virtual Appointments – available to all until 30 days after Teams Premium General availability.
• SMS notifications
• Organizational analytics in Admin Center
• Scheduled queue view

If you are still getting your head around Teams Premium and not sure if you really need it, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We at Impactory have been helping clients succeed with effective collaboration through Microsoft Teams since Day 1 of its release, and we’d be happy to talk to you about your Teams journey.

Additional resources

• Viva and Teams work great together. Find our more about Viva in our intro blog post.
• Do you need an Intranet when you have Teams? Take our stance on Intranet benefits and features to help you decide.
• Did you know Teams is using SharePoint as its file storage? This and many more facts can be found in our complete SharePoint guide.