Executive Summary
- With over 320 million daily active users, Microsoft Teams is the most widely used digital workplace platform in the world today – but Microsoft looks set to push those numbers even higher.
- Launched in February 2023, Microsoft Teams Premium is an add-on license for Microsoft 365 users which brings additional features to enhance productivity and make remote working even easier.
- Microsoft Teams Premium features include a suite of AI-powered tools to recap meetings and generate next steps, company branding, meeting templates, Virtual Appointments, webinar tools, and more.
Introduction
With 320 million daily active users in 2023, Microsoft Teams remains one of the most popular applications in the world.
Originally launched back in 2017, Teams really found its footing during the 2020 pandemic, when many companies made the move to remote working – and needed a digital workplace platform to support that change.
With so many people already using Teams, what more could Microsoft do to boost adoption? Well, the team’s next strategy seems to be the addition of a premium-tier version of the software, appropriately named Microsoft Teams Premium, which leverages generative AI tools to supercharge remote meetings.
But is the new flavour of Teams really worth the upgrade? And what new features does it bring to the table?
What is Microsoft Teams Premium?
Microsoft Teams Premium is an upgraded version of its digital workplace collaboration platform which contains premium features designed to make meetings more personalised and secure.
Building on the successful base of Microsoft Teams, the Premium edition of the collaboration platform includes all of the familiar features of the base app with a number of additions designed to make meetings “more personalised, intelligent, and protected.”
The core features of Microsoft Teams Premium
Let’s get down to the important bit: what makes Microsoft Teams Premium different to the base platform.
Here are the features unique to Teams Premium:
AI-powered intelligent recap
The power of AI is talk of the town at the moment, and Teams Premium is embracing it.
Intelligent recap in Teams Premium is like having a virtual assistant present in every meeting, leveraging the power of GPT from OpenAI. During calls, the AI assistant will make suggestions about the agenda in case something is missed. Once the call is done, it will create smart recordings of the call with chapters automatically added. It can even tell you exactly where your name was mentioned so you can jump to the most relevant spot in a call you’ve missed.
Advanced Virtual Appointments
Virtual Appointments is already an app available in Teams which provides a centralised dashboard for your organisation to manage your appointments. It enables you to manage customer appointments, use forms to streamline the pre-appointment process, set up email notifications for appointments, and more.
With Teams Premium, organisations can take advantage of Advanced Virtual Appointments, which also adds:
- Customised text message (SMS) reminders
- A waiting room with your organisation’s branding
- The ability to view on-demand and scheduled appointments in a single view
- More in-depth analytics
In addition to the Advanced Virtual Appointments, Teams Premium also upgrades the webinar experience, adding in a number of all-new controls for hosts, along with new event management controls.
Meeting templates
The concept of meeting templates in Teams Premium is all about making the experience of your Teams meetings more personalised to your business.
When creating a meeting in Teams Premium, you’ll be able to pick from presets which you can tweak to your needs. For example, you might want to set the length of a client meeting to a maximum of 60 minutes, or maybe you want to set whether or not external users are able to take part in particular types of meetings? With meeting guides, your team will be able to have these parameters set in a single click, rather than adjusting them prior to the call.
Customised company branding
Teams Premium allows you to set custom branding for any meeting by default, so that whenever your team is holding calls with clients, you’ll know your branding is front and centre. This includes custom backgrounds, meeting lobbies, and together modes which are automatically enabled by default.
Advanced meeting protection
Microsoft Teams has always been built on the security of the Microsoft 365 platform, but sometimes companies require a step-up in their cybersecurity.
With advanced meeting protection in Teams Premium, organisations can use new safeguarding and security options such as watermarking and the ability to prevent who can record calls. In this way, even if someone were to surreptitiously record their screen or take a screenshot, technologies like watermarking make it easy to trace the source.
Microsoft Teams Premium pricing
Microsoft Teams Premium is an add-on license for Microsoft 365 subscriptions, meaning any existing plan which includes Teams is eligible to upgrade to Teams Premium.
For Business users, that includes:
- Microsoft Teams Essentials
- Microsoft 365 Business Basic
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Provided you’re already on one of these tiers, you can currently add a Teams Premium license at a cost of £5.80 per user, per month.
It’s worth noting that Microsoft describes this as introductory pricing with a 30% discount, so it could switch back to around £7.50 at any time.
To learn more about Teams Premium, or to check up-to-date pricing for your Microsoft 365 subscription, just speak to your Get Support account manager or call us on 01865 594 000.
