Regardless of whether you work from home, the office or on the go, technology solutions like Microsoft 365 empower today’s distributed workforce to stay connected, and products like Microsoft Teams unite the workforce to make processes simpler and more flexible*.
Irrespective of one’s work location – be it home, office, or on-the-go, Microsoft 365 solutions offer the latest technology to empower distributed teams to remain connected. Microsoft Teams is a flagship product that unites remote teams, enabling streamlined and flexible processes. To leverage the full potential of Microsoft Teams, one must have a Microsoft 365 subscription, although a free version is available.
Why is it worth upgrading to a paid Microsoft Teams Premium subscription?
Microsoft Teams, the collaborative communication platform, is dedicated to continual evolution and enhancement. In 2022 alone, over 400 new features and improvements were introduced, with many more planned for 2023. This commitment to innovation has resulted in deeper connections and increased collaboration among Teams users.
However, some customers have expressed a need for advanced meeting capabilities to improve productivity and streamline their software investments. Currently, many organisations pay for separate meeting solutions while also purchasing costly add-ons for webinars, virtual appointments, and meeting intelligence, among other features.
To address this need, Microsoft Teams unveiled Teams Premium, an all-inclusive offering that delivers advanced meeting capabilities and more, all at an affordable cost of USD10** per user per month. For a limited time, Teams Premium is available at a discounted price of just USD7** per user per month, representing a 30 percent savings on the standard rate.
By opting for Teams Premium, organisations can enjoy a seamless, integrated solution for their meeting needs, consolidating their software investments and reducing costs. With Microsoft’s commitment to ongoing innovation and enhancement, Teams Premium is an excellent choice for any organisation seeking to optimise collaboration and productivity.
AI Capabilities
Microsoft Teams Premium provides a suite of AI-powered tools that enhance the meeting experience and increase productivity. One of its standout features is the intelligent recap, which automates note-taking, suggests actions, and curates personalised information for attendees who missed the meeting. This functionality not only simplifies administrative tasks but also frees up more time for valuable interactions.
Moreover, Teams Premium combines the expertise of Microsoft Teams with cutting-edge technologies, such as OpenAI’s GPT-powered Large Language Models, to provide intelligent, personalised, and secure meetings for various types of gatherings. Whether it’s a one-on-one conversation, a large assembly, a virtual session, or a webinar, Teams Premium leverages AI to make meetings more efficient and effective. This helps organisations remain adaptable and responsive, regardless of any obstacles that may arise.
Intelligent Recap
Intelligent Recap, a cutting-edge tool that empowers you to optimise your productivity while reviewing meeting recordings, leverages the power of artificial intelligence to parse meetings into discrete chapters, facilitating rapid selection and seamless focus on the most salient content. At present, this remarkable feature is available for PowerPoint Live meeting recordings and automatically generates meeting chapters based on the transcript.
intelligent recap: Screenshot Microsoft Teams Premium
Intelligent Recap is the result of Microsoft’s unwavering commitment to delivering ground-breaking technologies that elevate user experiences. By harnessing AI, this feature represents a significant step forward in streamlining the process of reviewing meeting recordings. With its automated chapterisation and intuitive interface, Intelligent Recap helps you save time and focus on what matters most, whether you are preparing for an upcoming meeting or seeking to revisit key insights from previous sessions.
With the help of our AI-powered intelligent recap, you can focus on the meeting discussion without the need to take notes. In the coming months, AI-generated notes featuring key points and takeaways will be automatically generated after the meeting, along with suggested tasks and action items. This will provide you with a comprehensive view of the meeting and enable you to take action on key items.
Improved UX experience and branding settings
With Teams Premium, you can effortlessly create inclusive and engaging meetings that mirror your organisation’s culture and policies and provide the best possible experience for your clients and employees. Representing your company’s brand and culture through the meeting experience is essential. Many organisations have emphasised the importance of tailoring meetings to ensure the best experience for their employees and clients, whether in-person or virtual.
personalisation and branding for meetings: Screenshot Microsoft Teams Premium
With Teams Premium, you can take personalisation and professionalism to the next level with branded meetings. This feature displays your company’s logo and colours when you join the meeting, creating a cohesive environment for your clients and employees. You can integrate your brand colours throughout the meeting for a more engaging experience. Furthermore, Teams Premium users can enable brand-approved organisational backgrounds and together mode scenes that highlight your company’s unique attributes and people.
Customised timeline markers
With customised timeline markers, you can now have a personalised view of the meeting, indicating the exact time when you entered or exited the meeting in the recorded version. This will enable you to easily locate and catch up on anything you may have missed. Microsoft Teams are also enhancing this feature to include instances when your name was referenced or a screen was shared, making it even easier for you to navigate the meeting recording.
In the near future, personalised meeting highlights will include speaker timeline markers, indicating who spoke during the meeting and when. These markers are intelligently organised by the people you work with most closely, ensuring that you never miss important feedback from your manager or colleagues. This will allow you to easily jump to any moment and gain valuable insights.
While AI-generated chapters for PowerPoint Live and personalised timeline markers for joining and leaving a meeting are already available, the additional intelligent recap features mentioned above will be released in the second quarter of 2023. We believe that these updates will further streamline the meeting experience and provide valuable insights to help you drive results.
Live translation in 40 distinct languages
Moreover, Team’s AI can assist you in conquering one of the most formidable hurdles of teamwork, which is interacting with colleagues who speak diverse languages. By using live captions in Teams, individuals can activate real-time captions in their preferred language.
Live translation: Screenshot Microsoft Teams Premium
Additionally, with the recent integration of live translations (for captions) in Teams Premium, meeting attendees can now read captions in their own language, bypassing the requirement for costly real-time translation services. Merely the meeting organiser requires Teams Premium for all participants to profit from live translations in 40 distinct languages, thereby enhancing meeting efficiency and ease.
Personalised meeting templates
The truth is that meetings cannot be universally standardised. For example, you wouldn’t want to conduct a confidential meeting in a coffee shop or hold a one-on-one meeting in an auditorium. In the case of scheduling an online meeting, people often resort to default settings to save time, as exploring meeting options can be a time-consuming task.
Personalised meeting templates: Screenshot Microsoft Teams Premium
Fortunately, with Teams Premium, IT administrators can design personalised meeting templates that automatically integrate the appropriate settings, such as those for a client call, brainstorming session, or help desk call. This feature eliminates the need for creating and configuring meetings accurately, saving valuable time and effort. Templates help leaders ensure that meetings conform to company policies and best practices.
Custom user policy packages
Just as meetings cannot be standardised, Teams policies are often customised based on user groups or departments. For instance, the legal department may have less strict policies for messaging or meetings with external users than external agency contractors. However, assigning individual policies for meetings, messaging, and apps can be a complex task. Fortunately, the introduction of custom user policy packages enables IT teams to save time by designing a customised set of policies for users with similar roles within the organisation. This simplified approach streamlines the process, saves time, and guarantees consistency while managing policies for groups of users across the organisation.
Confidentiality
Sensitive and confidential business conversations like board meetings, financial discussions, or undisclosed product reviews now happen through Teams meetings. While setting up a Teams meeting is a quick and straightforward process, it’s critical for sensitive meetings to have an added layer of protection to help ensure the content and information remain secure.
Watermarks and sensitivity labels: Screenshot Microsoft Teams Premium
With advanced meeting protection available today in Teams Premium, you can easily upgrade safeguards for confidential business meetings without hampering the meeting experience. New meeting options, like watermarking to deter leaks and limiting who can record, give you additional protections to keep the discussion private. Meeting organisers can leverage a unique watermark over attendee screen shares and video feeds to confidently present and display sensitive information. And for those rare, extremely sensitive meetings that require disabling some of the core meeting features for an advanced encryption option, IT-enabled users can apply end-to-end encryption (E2EE) option to the meeting. As a reminder, data exchanged during Teams calls or meetings is always secured using industry-standard encryption in transit and at rest.
appointment management and performance tracking
With advanced capabilities like appointment queuing, your scheduling administrators can efficiently set up and manage scheduled and on-demand virtual meetings from a single location. This feature enables organizations to measure the business value of virtual appointments and drive customer outcomes by providing department-level or organisation-level analytics on customer metrics such as wait times and no-show rates.
Watermarks and sensitivity labels: Screenshot Microsoft Teams Premium
When using the Virtual Appointments app, users can easily access appointment analytics, queue, and schedules from the Home screen. By clicking on Bookings Schedule, they can view a calendar of scheduled appointments and schedule new appointments by clicking on “New Booking.” Figure 10 demonstrates how management can be streamlined in a single location with appointment scheduling, queue viewing, and analytics.
With the new Virtual Appointments feature, your organisation can provide an exceptional customer experience, streamline appointment management, and measure results more effectively.
on demand
Connecting with customers virtually has become a requirement for various businesses, whether providing mortgage advice, conducting health visits, or selling products.
Teams Premium simplifies the process of connecting with customers and managing the entire customer experience with Virtual Appointments in Teams, saving businesses time and money by eliminating the need for additional add-ons or point solutions. Customers can enjoy a seamless joining experience by accessing virtual, branded lobby rooms through text messages or email on any device browser without having to download an app. This feature allows businesses to provide an exceptional customer experience.
scheduled and on-demand virtual appointments
With advanced capabilities like appointment queuing, your scheduling administrators can efficiently set up and manage scheduled and on-demand virtual appointments from a single location.
This feature enables organisations to measure the business value of virtual meetings and drive customer outcomes by providing department-level or organisation-level analytics on customer metrics such as wait times and no-show rates.
streamlined management: Screenshot Microsoft Teams Premium
When using the Virtual Appointments app, users can easily access appointment analytics, queue, and schedules from the Home screen. By clicking on Bookings Schedule, they can view a calendar of scheduled appointments and schedule new appointments by clicking on “New Booking.” Figure 10 demonstrates how management can be streamlined in a single location with appointment scheduling, queue viewing, and analytics.
With the new Virtual Appointments feature, your organisation can provide an exceptional customer experience, streamline appointment management, and measure results more effectively.
scheduled and on-demand virtual appointments
Organisations often require a comprehensive solution to host various virtual events, such as customer-facing webinars or organisation-wide training, providing a personalised experience for presenters and attendees.
Teams Premium offers webinars, a feature that enables effortless event hosting while saving time and money by eliminating the need for additional add-on solutions or multiple platforms. Webinars provide a virtual green room that allows presenters to prepare seamlessly before the event, with the ability to connect and brief or do a quick test run without disturbing attendees.
teams premium webinars: Screenshot Microsoft Teams Premium
Presenters can manage what attendees see more effectively during the webinar, resulting in more professionally produced events and increased engagement.
Attendees can engage with presenters and one another through chat and Q&A while waiting for the event to start. The registration experience is further enhanced by the registration waitlist, manual approval, and the ability to customise registration start and end times for better event management. Additionally, different external media feeds can be integrated into the webinar using RTMP-in to deliver more dynamic content and elevate presentations. By enabling RTMP-in and using an external encoder, custom RTMP sources, such as professionally produced videos or high-quality screen sharing, can be live-streamed to all attendees.
improved webinars ux with microsoft teams premium: Screenshot Microsoft Teams Premium
To generate excitement and increase attendance, timely reminders can be leveraged with automated reminder emails. These emails include a custom-branded header, webinar details, and a link to join the event and are sent to every confirmed registrant at a configured time set ahead of the event. The result is an exceptional and customisable webinar experience that meets the needs of both presenters and attendees.
automated reminder emails: Screenshot Microsoft Teams Premium
When using the Virtual Appointments app, users can easily access appointment analytics, queue, and schedules from the Home screen. By clicking on Bookings Schedule, they can view a calendar of scheduled appointments and schedule new appointments by clicking on “New Booking.” Figure 10 demonstrates how management can be streamlined in a single location with appointment scheduling, queue viewing, and analytics.
With the new Virtual Appointments feature, your organisation can provide an exceptional customer experience, streamline appointment management, and measure results more effectively.
Enhance the quality of live event experiences
Teams Premium now features the Microsoft Enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN), aimed at enhancing live event experiences for organisations. Teams Live Events allows businesses to efficiently and safely stream global meetings, town halls, and company-wide training, while Microsoft eCDN helps reduce network load and prevents connectivity issues and poor video quality. Furthermore, no additional installation is required on user endpoints and devices, making it a hassle-free solution.
How can Vantage 365 help you?
Vantage 365 is a specialist consultancy that helps businesses of all sizes get the most from their investment in Microsoft 365’s powerful suite of business tools and productivity apps. Our team of expert consultants has years of experience creating customised solutions, applications and strategies to optimise our clients’ technology, capabilities, and performance.
Our mission is to help every client reach their true potential by future-proofing their business and enabling them to thrive in today’s digital landscape. From small businesses to large enterprises, we understand that each company has unique needs and goals, and we work closely with our clients to develop tailored solutions that address their specific challenges.
Whether streamlining workflows, improving collaboration, or enhancing security, we have the expertise to maximise the benefits businesses receive from their investment in Microsoft 365. Our commitment to ongoing support and service ensures that our clients continue to achieve success and stay ahead of the curve in today’s rapidly evolving business environment.
Get in touch today to discover the potential of your Microsoft Subscriptions. We look forward to hearing from you.
*Disclaimer: This article was first published on November 24th and has since been reviewed to incorporate the latest features released by Microsoft Teams Premium.
**Please be advised that the pricing information provided herein was last reviewed on April 28th, 2023. Any modifications or updates made after this date are beyond our control and responsibility. We encourage you to verify the latest pricing details for our products and services directly through our official channels to ensure accurate and up-to-date information.)