Is Microsoft Teams Premium worth the investment?

Numerous organisations have come to rely on Microsoft Teams as a central hub for communication, collaboration, and file sharing. Some have even gone a step further by developing custom applications to enhance their Teams experience. For those seeking to elevate their virtual meetings with more personalisation, intelligence, and security, the premium version of Teams might just be the potential solution for you.

What sets Teams Premium apart from the standard version?

Microsoft Teams¹, at a glance, allows you to:

1. Host and attend standard Teams Meetings.
2. Utilise live captions during meetings.
3. Host a webinar for up to 1000 attendees.
4. Broadcast town halls to up to 10,000 attendees.
5. Host up to 15 town halls simultaneously.
6. Benefit from end-to-end encryption for one-to-one calls.
7. Moderate meeting chats.
8. Manage meeting lobbies.

In contrast, Microsoft Teams Premium² is an add-on license to the standard Teams license that enhances your meeting experience with the following key features:

1. Intelligent Recap.
   Acting as a virtual assistant, Intelligent Recap transforms your meeting notes by employing AI to interpret meeting transcripts, suggesting action items with their corresponding owners and citing the timing of each suggested action. This feature enhances productivity, making both attended and missed meetings more insightful.
   

2. Generative AI for Live Captions.
   Teams Premium introduces Generative AI for live captions, enabling real-time translation into 40 spoken languages. This not only facilitates language preferences for participants but also allows presenters to communicate in their chosen language. Each participant can choose their preferred language for captions, eliminating language barriers.
   
   
3. Custom Medium Branding.
   Teams Premium enables the personalisation of the meeting lobby with custom backgrounds, themes, and accent colours, projecting your brand identity to internal and external participants. This feature, combined with custom together modes for group meetings, streamlines the end-user meeting experience. Additionally, setting up meetings with specific options becomes more effortless as Teams Premium supports standard meeting templates with preconfigured settings. For example, you might be holding a meeting where you will want to limit who can bypass the lobby, choose who can take over as presenter, or disable attendee microphones, their cameras, and meeting chat. Or maybe you have a different set of options for remote job interviews or client discussions. You can remove the hassle of configuring those meetings individually as Teams Premium lets you set up standard meeting templates with everything preconfigured in advance.
   
   
4. Enhanced security.
   Teams Premium significantly enhances security by leveraging existing content data sensitivity labels in Microsoft Purview. Selecting the appropriate sensitivity label during meeting creation enforces corresponding security policies and applies watermarks to shared content and camera feeds. Watermarking acts as a powerful deterrent against data loss, even discouraging screen capture attempts. This, combined with policies to block meeting recordings, ensures robust content protection. And you can, of course, combine watermarking with policies to block meeting recordings to protect your content even further.
   
   
5. Virtual appointments.
   Teams Premium provides advanced capabilities for managing end-to-end appointment experiences with clients. It offers streamlined appointment setup and management, text reminders, and custom-branded virtual appointments accessible on mobile devices without requiring the Teams app. Real-time appointment queuing and comprehensive analytics on usage trends, history of virtual appointment experiences, and effectiveness like no-shows and wait times further enhance the appointment management process.
   
   
6. Webinars.
   For expansive Teams meeting experiences, Teams Premium introduces host and event management controls, including registration wait lists, manual approvals, and automated reminder emails. There is also the virtual green room that acts as a dedicated pre-event coordination space for hosts and presenters to ensure a smooth event with minimal distractions. Here, you can converse, monitor chat, manage Q&A, and review content before the event starts.

Considering these enhanced capabilities, is Microsoft Teams Premium a worthwhile investment? Absolutely! A modest additional investment in licenses unlocks:

1. More personalised and intelligent meetings, webinars, and town halls.
2. Enhanced protection for meetings.
3. Advanced management and reporting capabilities for IT.
4. Advanced virtual appointments.

Explore the possibilities with a 30-day free trial of Teams Premium, available through the Microsoft 365 admin centre. For any inquiries about Teams Premium, feel free to drop your questions in the comments or blog. Elevate your Teams experience today!

[1] Microsoft Teams Premium Licensing, Microsoft, November 2023.

[2] Microsoft Teams Premium Experiences and How to Set It Up, Microsoft Mechanics, YouTube.