Microsoft Teams Premium

Microsoft Teams Premium is now generally available for you to enhance productivity, collaboration, and security throughout your Teams experience.

Introduction

With Hybrid Working being the new norm, virtual meetings consuming the majority of workers' time and an increase of 252% in virtual meetings since the pandemic, there’s never been a more important time to invest in technology that empowers workforces, increases efficiency in virtual meetings while remaining highly secure. Microsoft Teams Premium is now generally available and is the perfect solution to make work more collaborative, intelligent and personalised. In this article we will discover together the features of Microsoft Teams Premium and how they can benefit your business.

Overview of Teams Premium 

Microsoft Teams Premium is the latest collaborative solution introduced from Microsoft that is designed to enhance your virtualised meeting experiences with added security and protection. Teams Premium is an add-on license. A user must be licensed with a plan or standalone license that includes Microsoft Teams for them to benefit from the Teams Premium add-on. This license is designed for any organisation, regardless of size, that wants to improve the internal and external collaboration of their workforce by introducing powerful integrations and Artificial Intelligence into Teams.

So the next question is, how does Teams Premium compare to Teams? And what are the new features available?

Teams Premium advances the already highly collaborative and popular Microsoft Teams, increasing the functionality exponentially. To begin with, meetings are now more personalised and catered to your organisation than ever before. With Teams Premium you can create meeting templates which create consistent meeting experiences for all stakeholders of the organisation while allowing organisations to implement and enforce compliance and security procedures. For example, a template designed for interviews can enable automatic recording and an organisational branded lobby. As well as this, you can also customise meeting themes and backgrounds.

The second key improvement with Teams Premium is one of the more highly anticipated and talked about features - the implementation of ChatGPT. With hybrid working the new norm, we spend countless hours a week in meetings, but how productive are they really? This AI enhanced Teams automates mundane tasks and habits associated with meetings and allows users to focus on the call, not just their note taking. Rather than individual users taking their own notes, Intelligent Recap introduces an ‘AI Virtual Assistant’ that will constantly listen during meetings. Meetings notes, tasks and actions are captured in the meeting notes section and actions are automatically suggested to owners to ensure that no follow ups are missed. Ultimately, it empowers employees to focus on the conversation and engage in the meeting. Meeting participants who were unable to attend can catch up with another feature of Intelligent Recap that hosts meeting notes and recordings in one place. This addition includes automated chapters and insightful highlights, for example when an individual’s name is mentioned or a screen is shared the action is signposted to the individual, reducing the length of time it takes to rewatch the session.

Crushing the Confusion

It's never nice when features we use leave us to join a paid-for add on. When speaking with organisations there is concern of this, but here at Softcat we'd like to put you at ease. Whilst there are features leaving Microsoft Teams and joining Microsoft Teams Premium, they aren't so frequently used, and their services benefit greatly from ChatGPT's capabilities.

With all these features, it’s important to note that each of them have a grace period of 30 or 60 days after general availability of Teams Premium. When the grace period has ended, users will lose access unless they purchase Teams Premium. To see what grace period each feature has, you can view this here. Where you can also see the additional minor features that are leaving for Teams Premium, with a few also discussed below.

First up is Live Translated Captions, where captions are translated live in the Teams meeting. Live Caption translations have moved to premium, but Live Captions are remaining on Teams to align with organisations’ important accessibility strategy. .

The second area which is migrating over to Teams Premium is PowerPoint live chapters and markers, which helps viewers find content relevant to themselves faster. This is facilitated through PowerPoint Live, and is now powered by the new AI platform within Teams Premium.

How can Teams Premium Improve Your Business?

All these features sound great, but the big question is, how can your organisation benefit from them? The focus is to automate your existing processes. Teams Premium is designed to:

1. Increase overall efficiency of a workforce.

2. Help your users find relevant topics of discussion in meeting recordings.

3. Simplify and collate follow up notes into one place, providing a welcomed option as opposed to individual users taking their own notes.

4. Provide a personalised experience for you, your external collaborators and last, but certainly not least – customers!

How can you purchase Microsoft Teams Premium?

If Microsoft Teams Premium is of interest to you or your organisation, then please get in contact with your aligned Account Manager to learn more. Microsoft Teams Premium can be purchased on CSP, EA and ESA agreements.