In recent years, Teams has become an essential tool for remote collaboration and communication. With its user-friendly interface and extensive features, it has become a go-to platform for businesses of all sizes. However, with the new offering of Microsoft Teams Premium, the platform has taken things to the next level.
While the standard version of Teams offers a range of powerful tools, the premium version takes it to the next level with advanced intelligence, and greater customisation for meetings and webinars. But is it really worth the extra cost?
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the new features introduced to Teams Premium to help you decide whether upgrading is the right choice for your business. So, whether you’re a small startup or a large corporation, read on to find out more.
What is Microsoft Teams Premium?
Teams Premium is Microsoft’s new offering, released February 2023, and was designed to provide customers with meeting solutions, webinars, virtual appointments, meeting intelligence, and integration of OpenAI technology.
This new offering provides a personalised and secure experience to users, making it an ideal solution for businesses of all sizes. A free 30-day trial is on offer for existing Teams customers, and the upgrade is $7 per person, per month – 30% off the standard price.
Teams Premium features
With Teams Premium, your users will gain access to features not available with a Teams Standard subscription.
- Ability to customise meeting templates to make them specific for your business.
- Add your business’s brand or logo to meeting lobbies.
- Customise all meeting backgrounds.
- Customise Together Mode for your business’s internal meetings.
- Live translated captions during meetings.
- Translate post-meeting transcripts.
- Turn on real-time data storage.
- Turn on eCDN (Enterprise Content Delivery Network) for Live Events.
- Add watermarks to meetings.
- Enable end-to-end encryption for meetings with up to 50 participants.
- Control who is able to record meetings.
- Control copy/paste options in meeting chats.
- Assign Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels for meetings (only available to Microsoft 365 E5 subscriptions).
- Offers custom user policy packages.
- Turn on advanced meeting monitoring and alerting.
- Navigate recordings of meetings with autogenerated chapters.
- Time markers in meeting recordings when users join or leave the meeting.
- Search through transcripts with speaker suggestions.
- View autogenerated tasks from the meeting.
- View when specific users were @mentioned.
- Set up a green room for webinar presenters.
- Send reminder emails to people who have registered for webinars.
- Manage how the attendee views the webinar.
- Create waiting lists for webinars.
- Manually approve people who request attendance to webinars.
- Place time restrictions on webinar attendance registrations.
- Registered users can bypass the lobby.
- Customise lobby waiting rooms with your business’s logos/brand.
- Send text message notifications to appointment customers.
- Chat with people in the waiting room.
- Manage queued scheduled appointments.
- Manage queues on-demand appointments.
- Send follow-ups after the appointment.
- Departmental and organisational analytics are available.
OpenAI technology integration
Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI has seen its GPT-3.5 model added to Teams Premium. The intelligence recap helps users with their productivity, and in catching up with meetings they may have missed. The AI suggests action items and tasks following meetings to users, and helps them navigate recordings and transcripts more quickly and easily.
The AI will also make captions and live translation (in 40 languages) options available for users during meetings, and only the organiser will need the Teams Premium licence for all meeting attendees to use these features, regardless of their subscriptions.
With the addition of OpenAI to Teams, Microsoft may also bring the language AI technology to its Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook applications.
Should you upgrade from Teams Standard to Premium?
Microsoft Teams Standard subscription packages will remain the same, with Premium available as an add-on for users who want to manage their interactions more closely with greater control over the user ownership. When deciding whether to upgrade your Teams licence, consider the following:
Cost: Does Premium’s upgrade fit into your budget? Will your users make enough use of Teams Premium for it to be worth the additional monthly fee?
Users: Do you and your team regularly set up internal and external meetings, or host webinars? Do you require a more customisable solution, or need live translated captions?
Features: Are you getting enough out of your current Teams licence? Would your team benefit from actionable AI recaps?
Business strategy: Consider your industry, customers, IT strategy, and future goals. Will Premium better support your business needs?
Find the right solution with expert assistance
The core essence of Teams Premium is that it provides a more personalised experience, with greater control over who can participate in meetings, and tools to keep track of their progress. However, don’t forget that Teams Standard is still available as a free option for your business – and that, as with any product, you can always opt out of Premium, or downgrade to a lower tier if you don’t need or want all its features.
Certified Microsoft consultant Platform 24 has all the expertise and experience needed to audit your business and advise you on the right solution for your needs. Talk to them today and enhance your Teams environment.
