Is Microsoft Teams Premium worth it?

Whether it’s a one-on-one meeting, a webinar, or a virtual appointment, optionally tailor your meeting to your audience. Teams Premium is even more personalized, thanks to powerful AI (artificial intelligence), smarter and even more secure. Learn about Microsoft Teams Premium in the following blog post and find out if the additional license is worth it for you.

Note: Some features that were previously available in Teams are now only available with a Microsoft Teams Premium license.

1. Personalized meetings

Those who conduct an online meeting in teams often use the default meeting setting. This is because individual settings used to take a lot of time. That’s over now! In Teams Premium, meeting guides help you create the ideal meeting environment.

Pre-defined options save you planning & time for, for example, a customer appointment, an internal meeting or a helpdesk call. In addition, companies can ensure that all meetings comply with corporate policies and best practices.

Note: Meeting instructions can be managed and customized by your IT department.

In the physical environment, a cool office, business cards or even promotional items in the workplace reflect the company branding. Thanks to Teams Premium, you have the possibility to customize the meeting lobby specifically to your own company branding and develop individual backgrounds.

Note: To prevent trademark misuse, administration and management here is also carried out by your IT department.

Personalized meetings

2. Use artificial intelligence (AI)

2.1 Intelligent summary

Every day, we spend an enormous amount of time in meetings. Not all of them are productive, even if they are part of the duty to stay up to date. If you miss a meeting, you have to search the recording for important topics. In Teams Premium, you get a summary that is created using AI (artificial intelligence). In it, actions as well as persons responsible for follow-up actions are indicated. It does not matter whether you were actually at the meeting or not.

Following the meeting, the smart summary creates a smart record with automatically generated chapters and insights. This includes, for example, if your name was used, a screen was shared, or the meeting was left early.

2.2 Live translation of subtitles

How does a presentation work and succeed when the participants do not speak the same language? Teams Premium offers AI-driven real-time translation in 40 different languages. Accordingly, participants can read the subtitles in the desired language. This feature is designed to overcome language barriers and make meetings easier and more productive.

3. Discreet conduct of confidential meetings.

In some cases, meetings contain business-critical or confidential information. These are passed on via screen transmission or verbally. Certain content, such as financial consultations, non-public product launches or board meetings, must be additionally secured.

In the future, you will be able to protect the confidential meetings you want in Team Premium thanks to the advanced meeting protection. Watermarking and other new meeting options eliminate data leaks. Furthermore, the group of people who can record the respective meeting is limited.

Extended meeting protection

4. Simplify participation for customers in meetings

Some people do not have the technical knowledge to participate in a virtual meeting. Others miss the meeting date or have trouble registering.

In Teams Premium you have the option to send your customers an SMS reminder for the respective appointment. It also enables participation via mobile devices without the need to download the Teams app.

You can imagine this as follows:

1) Your customer will receive an SMS reminder on their mobile device.

2) The person clicks on the link contained therein and immediately enters the individual virtual meeting waiting room.

3) Finally, the virtual meeting begins.

5. Evaluate comprehensive analyses

If sufficient participation and active engagement metrics have not been captured over a long-term period, it makes it difficult to extract insights and trends to optimize the customer experience and business results.

That’s why Teams Premium offers analytics at the employee, department, and company levels. You can then see virtual appointment history, usage trends, and effectiveness (such as no-shows or wait times).

Evaluate comprehensive analyses

6. Advanced Webinars

To stand out from the competition, to make and maintain new contacts is proving increasingly difficult in today’s age. It does not matter whether these are potential customers for new business fields or skilled workers for the company itself.

Basic webinar features of the Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans include: up to 1’000 attendees, co-organizer role, interactive question-and-answer sessions, attendee reporting and Dynamics 365 Marketing integration. Building on this, in Teams Premium with Advanced Webinars, new host control and event management capabilities allow you to seamlessly engage any audience. Advanced Webinars provides excellent support before as well as during the meeting for a product launch, integrating new team members or even expanding the business through new customer contacts.

7. Accelerate registration workflows

In Teams Premium, event registration builds on the webinar features in Teams and is simplified with waitlist and manual approval. If the waiting list is activated, the webinar registration will remain available even if the set capacity has been reached by the organizer. Persons who subsequently register will be placed on the waiting list. If a space becomes available, the top person changes to the status ”Waiting for approval.” Accordingly, the organizers have the opportunity to check the registration details. Then the organizer can accept or reject the registration.

Furthermore, you have the option to send a reminder email to the registered participants before the respective webinar. Thus, they will be reminded of the upcoming webinar.

In the reminder email, you can customize the header and include the webinar details and participation link.

8. Customize speaker & participant experience

The organizers and the speakers can meet in the so-called virtual green room before the event. In this area, you are separated from the participants and can manage participant settings, exchange ideas or even review content together before the event.

In the webinar, you as the organizer can design the participant view so that only shared content and specific people are visible on the screen. For example, define only the speakers or participants who raise their ”hand” to share the question or comment.

9. Free trial version

Organizations have the opportunity to test Teams Premium for 30 days free of charge. For this you need to purchase a free trial license. The trial license has 25 licenses, which you can assign to users. After the 30-day trial period, all users will automatically lose the functionality of Teams Premium.

If your company decides to purchase the Teams Premium license, the licenses must be reassigned to users after the purchase.

Learn more about Microsoft Teams and our offerings.

We are always happy to help you with questions and enhancements: