Microsoft Teams Premium is a paid tier of Teams announced in October 2022 at the time of the Microsoft Ignite conference and is generally available from Feb 2023. (so now).
These additional capabilities (more info later) are focussed around:
- Creating more personalised and intelligent meetings and webinars.
- Improved and enhanced security protection for meetings
- Advanced management and reporting capabilities for IT.
- Advanced Virtual Appointments.
- Deep AI analytical date provided through Open AI’s GPT 3.5
It costs around $10 pupm depending on your region, country and license agreement.
What are the differences?
Not to be confused with Teams Room Premium (now Teams Room Pro), Teams Premium is Teams add-on license that allows organisations that already have Teams with their Microsoft 365 subscriptions to further enhance their Teams experience with benefits such as more personalised and intelligent meetings, enhanced meeting protection, and advanced management deep AI and reporting capabilities.
Teams Premiums’ key features over the “standard” version included within Microsoft 365 can are summarised below. The data is taken from official Microsoft information, the source of which is here).
Meetings
Teams Premium provides additional features for customizing meetings including enhanced templates, customisable themes, company backgrounds and custom together modes and analytics provided through GPT 3.5 open AI model
| Feature | Teams (Standard) | Teams Premium |
| Host and attend Teams Meetings | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Experience Teams’ standard look and feel | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Use standard & custom meeting backgrounds at user level | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Read live captions during meetings | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Customise meeting templates for your company | ✔️ | |
| Add company branding to meeting lobbies | ✔️ | |
| Customise meeting backgrounds for your company | ✔️ | |
| Customise Together mode scenes for your company | ✔️ | |
| Read live translated captions during meetings | ✔️ | |
| Translate post-meeting transcriptions (coming soon) | ✔️ | |
| Turn on real-time data storage | ✔️ | |
| Turn on eCDN for Live Events | ✔️ |
Webinars and Premium events
Teams Premium provides an advanced webinar experience for organisers, presenters and attendees.
| Feature | Teams (Standard) | Teams Premium |
| Require attendees to register | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Assign a co-organiser | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Limit the number of people who can register | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Read live captions during meetings | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Turn on Q&A for webinars with up to 1000 attendees | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| View attendance reports | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Integrate with Dynamics 365 | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Set up a green room for webinar presenters | ✔️ | |
| Manage attendees’ view | ✔️ | |
| Send reminder emails to registrants | ✔️ | |
| Create a webinar wait list | ✔️ | |
| Manually approve registrants | ✔️ | |
| Limit the day and time when people can register | ✔️ | |
| Allow registered users to bypass the lobby | ✔️ | |
| Use RTMP-In for Webinars (coming soon) |
Meeting Protection / Security
Teams Premium provides additional ways to safeguard meetings with features such as sensitivity labels, meeting water marking and end to end encryption which includes video, chat and content.
| Feature | Teams (Standard) | Teams Premium |
| Manage meeting lobbies | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| End-to-end encryption for one-to-one calls | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Moderate meeting chats | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Control who can present | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Add watermarks to meetings | ✔️ | |
| E2E encryption for meetings with up to 50 attendees | ✔️ | |
| Control who can record | ✔️ | |
| Prevent copy/paste in meeting chats | ✔️ | |
| Assign Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels for meetings [Requires Microsoft 365 E5] | ✔️ | |
| Custom user policy packages | ✔️ | |
| Turn on advanced meeting monitoring and alerting | ✔️ |
Meetings Reporting
| Feature | Teams (Standard) | Teams Premium |
| View recordings of meetings | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| View meeting transcripts | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| View and use files added to meetings | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| View and use apps added to meetings | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Navigate meeting recordings with autogenerated chapters (coming soon) | ✔️ | |
| View time markers in meeting recordings when you joined or left a meeting (coming soon) | ✔️ | |
| Search meeting transcripts with speaker suggestions (coming soon) | ✔️ | |
| View and act on autogenerated tasks from meetings (coming soon) | ✔️ | |
| View when you were @mentioned | ✔️ | |
Virtual Appointments
With any Microsoft 365 license, users can use basic Virtual Appointments capabilities to schedule and join business-to-customer meetings. For example, users can schedule appointments in the Bookings calendar and external attendees can join through a browser without having to download Teams.
Teams Premium provides advanced Virtual Appointment capabilities, such as SMS notifications, custom waiting rooms, and analytics.
| Feature | Teams (Standard) | Teams Premium |
| Access Virtual Appointments with the Bookings app for scheduling, appointment management, and email notifications | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Integrate Virtual Appointments using APIs | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Join appointments from a browser | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Join appointments in Teams | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Allow users to join a virtual lobby waiting room | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Integrate with Microsoft Forms | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Customize the lobby waiting room with themes and logos | ✔️ | |
| Send SMS notifications | ✔️ | |
| Chat back and forth with attendees in the lobby waiting room | ✔️ | |
| Organizational and departmental analytics | ✔️ | |
| View and manage scheduled appointments in the queue | ✔️ | |
| View and manage on-demand appointments in the queue | ✔️ | |
| Send post-appointment follow-ups (coming soon) | ✔️ |
Who needs Teams Premium
Whilst not every organisation (or user within an organisation) may need Teams Premium.
Organisations can try Teams Premium by purchasing the zero-cost Teams Premium 30-day trial license available in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Organisations with a Teams Premium trial license will have up to 25 licenses to assign to users. Those 25 users can experience and test Teams Premium features as they become available. Also, the admin can manage Teams Premium features for the 25 licensed users. The trail will last 30 days after which the premium features ill be disabled unless a paid license is purchased for the users that need / want them.
Most organization segments can purchase and use the Teams Premium trial license, excluding GCC High and DoD tenants.
Beware: “Some” Teams features will also move to Teams Premium
Microsoft have advised that with the general release of Teams Premium (in Feb 2023), some Teams features will in fact move from Teams licenses to Teams Premium licenses. To be fair these are mainly centered around advanced reporting, company branding and webinar premium features.
Features moving to Teams Premium are:
- Live translated captions.
- Timeline markers in Teams meeting recordings for when a user left or joined meetings.
- Custom organisation settings: Together mode scenes.
- Virtual Appointments: SMS notifications.
- Virtual Appointments: Organizational analytics in the Teams admin center.
- Virtual Appointments: Scheduled queue view.
Preparing for Teams Premium
To prepare your organisation for Teams Premium and to determine if, where and when it fits, the following are key IMO
- Take advantage of the free (25 user) 1 month trail to ensure IT and your Client Success Teams can understand the user and admin features
- Run a trial for key departments around the areas of most interest or value
- Update or deliver end user training to ensure you get the value from the new features
- Gather feedback from trial and live users to assess wider deployment
- Keep your support team in the loop (so they can support your users with these new features)
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