Many organizations spend a lot of money on meeting solutions that require additional products for webinars, virtual appointments, meeting intelligence, and other features. These add-ons can increase the complexity and cost of online collaboration. This is an area that Teams Premium excels in.

Teams Premium adds new “premium” features to Microsoft Teams that leverages AI to enhance your meetings and overall collaboration. It offers smart, customized, and secure features for any type of meeting, from one-on-one to webinars. It includes other features as well such as the ability to customize the meeting lobby with your company branding.

What is Teams Premium?

Teams Premium is an add-on available for organizations with a subscription to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. This add-on elevates the Teams experience with a host of new features that provide an all-new level of security, personalization, and intelligence. With Teams Premium, you can leverage AI capabilities to transcribe and translate your meetings, create live events and webinars, access advanced analytics and reporting, and customize your team’s apps and workflows.

With Teams Premium, you can enjoy benefits such as secure meetings, customized meeting templates, advanced events, and online appointments.

Microsoft Teams Premium Features

Protect Your Meetings

Microsoft Teams Premium enables you to secure your meetings with the following features:

  • You can add Sensitivity Labels to protect (encrypt) meeting content.
  • You can add a custom Watermark to meetings and recordings.
  • You can enhance the security of your Teams meetings (up to 50 participants) with End-to-End Encryption.

Customize Your Meetings

  • Create custom Meeting Templates to establish standard settings for different types of meetings, and save time setting up a meeting
  • With Meeting Themes, you can customize the look and feel of your meetings. You can choose from a variety of themes or create your own to match your brand identity and meeting purpose. Meeting themes can help you make your meetings more engaging and professional for your participants.
  • With Custom Meeting Backgrounds, you can upload and use your own images as backgrounds in Teams meetings and for the lobby experience. You can showcase your creativity, personality, or brand identity with custom meeting backgrounds.
  • With Custom Together Mode Scenes, you can use AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology to create a shared background for all meeting participants. This can make your meetings more immersive and collaborative, as if everyone is in the same space.

Premium Events

Premium Events is a new feature of Microsoft Teams Premium that offers a high-quality webinar experience. With Premium Events, you can create and host engaging and informative events for your attendees. Premium Events gives you the following benefits:

  • You can add your own Custom Question and Terms and Conditions to the event registration form. This way, you can collect important information from your attendees and make sure they agree to your rules before they join the event.
  • You can showcase your Presenters’ Profiles and Credentials to your attendees. This way, you can build trust and credibility with your audience and highlight your presenters’ expertise and experience.
  • You can customize your event page with your own Banner, Logo, and Predefined Color This way, you can create a consistent and professional look for your event and reflect your brand identity.
  • You can access a comprehensive set of Advanced Registration Capabilities to manage and monitor your event registration. These tools help you to simplify the registration process and ensure a high level of attendance and engagement. You can also get valuable insights into your attendees’ behavior and engagement.
  • You can view and manage your event registrations and attendee information in one place. This way, you can ensure a smooth registration process, improve attendance and engagement, and provide organizers with valuable insights into attendee behavior and engagement.
  • Microsoft eCDN works by intelligently distributing the live video streams from the Teams cloud to the edge servers closest to your viewers, minimizing the network hops and congestion. Microsoft eCDN supports both multicast and peer-to-peer delivery modes, giving you the flexibility to choose the best option for your network topology and security requirements.

Advanced Virtual Appointment Features

Microsoft Teams Premium offers you a range of features that can help you improve your virtual appointment experience. Whether you are hosting or attending a virtual appointment, you can benefit from these features:

  • SMS Notifications: You can send text messages to your attendees to remind them of their upcoming appointments. This way, you can increase your attendance rates and provide your attendees with timely and customized reminders.
  • Custom Waiting Room: You can tailor the waiting room experience for your attendees who join your appointments. You can create a more professional and personalized impression for your attendees with this feature.
  • A Queue of Scheduled and On-Demand Appointments: You can manage and prioritize your appointments more easily. You can organize your appointments more efficiently and focus on your most important appointments.
  • Analytics: You can access data and insights on your appointments. You can ensure a better experience for both yourself and your attendees while also making better decisions based on real data.

Security & Compliance

Microsoft Teams Premium offers advanced features that help you protect your sensitive information, comply with legal and regulatory obligations, and defend against cyber threats. Some of these features are:

  • Data Loss Prevention (DLP): DLP policies enable you to create rules that detect and protect sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or social security numbers, from being exposed or leaked within Teams.
  • eDiscovery and Legal Hold: eDiscovery and legal hold capabilities allow you to search and find relevant data within Teams and preserve specific content for legal or regulatory purposes.
  • Advanced Threat Protection: Advanced threat protection features help you prevent malicious attacks and malware. These features include anti-phishing protection, safe links, and safe attachments, which help you avoid clicking on harmful links or opening infected attachments within Teams.
  • Premium Support: Teams Premium includes 24/7 phone and web support from Microsoft experts.

AI Powered Assistance

With Teams Premium, you can use AI to generate task lists from your meetings automatically. You don’t have to worry about taking notes or missing important action items. AI will extract the tasks from the meeting audio and video and create a list for you. You can then assign, track, and manage your tasks in Teams.

Another AI feature in Teams Premium is the ability to summarize your meetings. AI will analyze the meeting transcript and highlight the key points, decisions, and outcomes. You can easily search and review the summary in Teams, or share it with others who missed the meeting. This way, you can save time and stay on the same page.

How Teams Premium Differs from the Standard Version

Teams Premium offers some key advantages over the Standard version of Teams, especially in terms of meeting capacity and security features. With Teams Premium, users can host meetings with up to 20,000 attendees, while the free version of Teams only allows up to 300 people in a meeting. This makes Teams Premium more suitable for large-scale organizations or events.

Furthermore, Teams Premium provides more security options for businesses that deal with confidential information or need to follow regulations. Users can access advanced security controls to protect their data and meet compliance standards.

Is Teams Premium worth it for your organization?

If you are using Teams for your communication and collaboration needs, you might be wondering whether you should upgrade to Teams Premium. Teams Premium offers some exclusive features that are not available in Teams Standard, as well as some enhanced capabilities that can boost your productivity and engagement. Here are some factors to consider before making the decision.

  • Do you use any of the features that are moving to Teams Premium? Microsoft has announced that some of the features that were previously included in Teams Standard will now require a Teams Premium subscription. These features include live translated captions, custom Together mode scenes, PowerPoint Live chapters, timeline markers, SMS, scheduled queue view, and organizational analytics for Virtual Appointments. If you rely on any of these features, you might want to upgrade to Teams Premium to keep using them.
  • Do you need any of the value-added features that Teams Premium offers? Teams Premium also provides some additional features that can enhance your video calls, events, and webinars. For example, you can get 1,000-person interactive meetings, 20,000 person view-only broadcasts, custom registration pages, attendee reporting, and host controls. These features can be especially useful if you use video calls extensively for customer-facing scenarios or large-scale events.

Ultimately, the value of Teams Premium depends on how your organization uses Teams and what features are most important for your goals. You can compare the features and pricing of Teams Standard and Teams Premium here.

Conclusion

Different businesses have different needs and goals for using Teams. Teams Premium can help you achieve more with Teams by offering a range of advanced features that enhance your collaboration, productivity, and security. If you want to implement Teams Premium within your organization, feel free to contact Softlanding for more information.

 

Written By:

softlanding

Softlanding is a long-established IT services provider of transformation, professional services and managed IT services that helps organizations boost innovation and drive business value. We are a multi-award-winning Microsoft Gold Partner with 13 Gold Competencies and we use our experience and expertise to be a trusted advisor to our clients. Headquartered in Vancouver, BC, we have staff and offices in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary to serve clients across Canada.

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