What is Microsoft Teams Premium?

Whether it is a one-on-one discussion, virtual appointment, or webinar, hybrid and virtual meetings are the driving forces of businesses in today’s era. Therefore, setting up the right meeting with the appropriate capabilities sets the tone for your organization and entire meeting. With Teams Premium, Microsoft is helping businesses transform their virtual meeting experiences by not only eliminating physical barriers, but also taking today’s meeting culture to the next level. Teams Premium is an integrated solution that allows organizations with Microsoft 365 subscriptions to enhance their Teams experience with benefits that enable them to personalize, protect, and improve their meetings. In this article, we will discuss the features of the new add-on Microsoft Teams Premium license.

Personalized Meetings

With Teams Premium’s new personalization features, you can easily create meetings that represent your company and align with your organization’s policies. When meeting with clients or collaborating with a co-worker, an essential part of the experience is representing the company brand and culture—something that was not at the forefront in virtual meetings. For this reason, Microsoft Teams added several features that let businesses add their own touch and image into each meeting.

Teams Premium’s custom backgrounds and meeting themes allow you to infuse your company’s logo and colors into your virtual meetings for everyone to see. Moreover, during the meeting, Teams Premium users can not only enable brand-approved organization backgrounds, but also use organization together mode scenes which allows them to create the perfect environment and place participants where they see fit. Custom together mode scenes can be based on well-known physical meeting spaces to extend your visual identity across the meeting experience.

As each meeting is unique, IT admins can create customized meeting templates—like a client call, brainstorming meeting, or help desk call— to automatically include the correct settings to help you save time. With templates, managers can guarantee that meetings follow the company’s best practices and policies.

More Intelligence

The new work culture has shown businesses that this era is all about working smarter and not working harder, as people can do more in less time when given the right technologies. In meetings, there is a lot of time-consuming administrative work to be done, like taking notes, pinpointing important takeaways, and capturing the right action items and owners. That is why Microsoft Teams has incorporated AI to transform the meeting experience and empower users to be more productive by focusing on what matters.

Intelligent recap in Teams Premium includes all the key areas that help users take advantage of each meeting and quickly catch up if he/she has missed any meeting. Powered by GPT, users automatically get generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights to help them get the most important information. With intelligent recap, follow-up becomes easy with AI-generated tasks and action items automatically suggested for you.

In addition to keeping track of meeting highlights, AI also helps break the language barrier during meetings with Teams Premium’s live translations (for captions) capability. AI-powered real-time translations from 40 spoken languages allow meeting participants to read captions in their own language— helping them save money and making meetings more productive and effortless. Only the meeting organizer needs to have Teams Premium for all meeting attendees to enjoy live translations.

Increased Protection

As meetings have shifted to more virtual or hybrid experiences, security has become one of businesses’ major concerns. With Teams Premium’s advanced meeting protection capabilities, companies can protect their sensitive information in meetings and keep discussions private.

Watermarking, one of the new meeting options, helps you prevent data leaks as each participant’s email id covers the screen during screen shares and video feeds. In addition, meeting organizers can designate who can record the meeting and enable end-to-end encryption for online meetings that require a higher level of protection.

Another advanced meeting option in Teams Premium is sensitivity labels which can be used for two main things: classification of a meeting and more protection.

•  The first function lets users classify the meeting by adding a label which will be displayed in the meeting or on the associated calendar item in Teams and Outlook. For example, the label can be called “Internal” or “Confidential.”
• The second functionality of sensitivity labels is that they protect the meeting in terms of rights by setting what can or can’t be done in the meeting. For instance, users can control meeting options such as recording, watermarking, and end-to-end encryption. Even more so, sensitivity labels contain copy protection which prevents meeting participants from copying data from the meeting chat. Data encryption is also an important component of sensitivity labels, as meeting items, responses and attachments contained in the calendar items become encrypted for more protection.

Advanced Personalized Virtual Appointments

Connecting with customers and managing the end-to-end customer experience has never been easier with Virtual Appointments in Microsoft Teams. Clients can enjoy a seamless join meeting experience that allows external attendees to join meetings through text messages or email on any browser—without them having to download an app.

Teams Premium includes advanced capabilities such as appointment Queue to help scheduling administrators set up and manage scheduled and on-demand appointments all in one location. Organizations can also measure the business value of virtual appointments and gain insights into customer outcomes such as wait times and no-show rates with Teams Premium’s advanced feature called Analytics.

Improved Webinar Experiences

With Teams Premium, organizations no longer need to buy add-on solutions nor work across different platforms to get things ready and manage live events, including webinars, in Microsoft Teams. With capabilities such as the virtual green room, presenters can easily prepare for their webinar and do a quick briefing without disturbing attendees. As attendees wait for the webinar to begin, they can engage with presenters through chat and Q&A.

Additionally, during the webinar, presenters can manage what attendees see to stay focused on only specific people by deciding whose avatars or video feeds to display during a Teams webinar and meeting. This creates a more dynamic engagement with the attendees.

Along with these meeting capabilities, the registration experience is optimized with registration waitlist and manual approval and the ability to customize the registration start and end times for better event management. Organizers can also send automated reminder emails to confirmed registrants at a specified date and time organizers set ahead of the event. The reminder email includes a custom-branded header, webinar details, and a link to join the event.

Final Thoughts

With AI intelligence at its core, Teams Premium gives you the capabilities to elevate main areas of your virtual business practices and put your company’s identity at the forefront. As your meetings become more personalized, intelligent, and secure, you can focus on what is important for your business, save time, and increase productivity.

If you are looking to upgrade your meetings and keep up with the latest technology, Teams Premium has all the capabilities your business needs. Reach out to our experts to learn more about Teams Premium and to get started.