Remote conferences have become an integral part of organizations in the post covid world. In addition, by 2025, 50% of all virtual organizational events will be held on video conferencing platforms. For such events, Microsoft Teams is the ideal tool for remote conferencing.
With Microsoft 365, employees from different locations may stay in touch with one another regardless of their schedules. As part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to innovation, they just released Microsoft Teams Premium.
Microsoft Teams Premium connects teams to streamline business communications, revolutionizing how people hold virtual meetings. It improves the customization, insight, and safety of any meeting, whether one-on-one or in a group.
Rather than paying multiple times as much for different products and add-ons, you can get everything you need with Teams Premium at $7 per user per month.
Keep reading to learn how Microsoft Teams is changing the face of video conferencing.
Microsoft Teams Premium – features for remote conferencing
The new Microsoft team’s premium version is more personalized and innovative than previous versions. It is beneficial on both personal and enterprise scales. Furthermore, premium licensing allows users to have additional benefits and options.
Teams Premium for meetings
Customized meeting templates
Preview users can access meeting templates as part of Teams Premium, an add-on license that includes features to enhance the personalization, intelligence, and security of Team meetings.
With Microsoft Teams Premium, you can design your own meeting formats. In a meeting, the organizer can utilize a meeting template to manage the usual meeting settings. Its goal is to give each meeting a structure for it to go more smoothly.
It’s possible to prevent the organizer from making changes by setting a lock on each template, or the organizer can leave it unlocked.
Live translation
Make transcription active to get a written record of the discussion. The transcript will be available for download following the conference call.
One of the most sought-after features of Microsoft Teams Premium is real-time translation powered by artificial intelligence.
The technology will now directly translate voice to text and other languages, providing live captions in as many as 40 languages.
Meetings can be more accessible to all attendees by allowing them to keep track of discussions in their language. This is fantastic news for organizations with geographically diverse employees who speak a wide variety of languages.
Live translations are available to all meeting attendees with just one additional requirement: the meeting organizer must have Teams Premium.
Intelligent recaps
When you use intelligent recap, you can rest assured that you have all the pertinent details from a meeting at your fingertips.
Premium will get access to cutting-edge technology, including the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. This allows businesses to implement a system automatically produces meeting-related follow-up tasks, reviews, and information.
To make every meeting more innovative, personalized, and secure, Microsoft has integrated the Big Language Models that enable the OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT into Teams Premium.
Microsoft is banking on its new “intelligent recap” tool to revolutionize how groups communicate digitally. This feature will be valuable in settings like webinars and online meetings. It reduces the time workers spend pouring over meeting minutes in search of takeaways.
Based on the transcript, the feature can also automatically create meeting chapters. Everyone who has to leave a meeting early can listen to the parts they missed using personalized timeline markers.
Moreover, there could be aspects of a meeting that you wish to go over again. Timeline markings only you can see indicate when you entered and exited a meeting in the recording, making it easy to jump in and catch up on what you missed. In the future, your name and screen-sharing activity will be marked on the timeline according to your preferences.
Intelligent recap also frees you from taking notes during meetings so you can pay more attention to the conversation at hand. GPT-3.5 automatically prepares notes, highlighting the most important points and takeaways from the meeting. You may easily follow up on AI-generated tasks and action items that will appear as recommendations.
Manage attendees’ view
To make your meetings with Teams even more tailored, intelligent, and secure, you can now take control of who sees what by pre-purchasing a license for Microsoft Teams Premium
Keeping guests interested after they’ve signed up for the meeting is just as important as catching their attention in the first place if you want your meeting to be a success.
If someone inadvertently turns on their video or numerous profile images of attendees appear on-screen, you may control what they view so that the meeting continues smoothly.
You may also want to customize guest view, so they only see what you want to share with them. Moreover, meetings can feature different presentations, from those given by numerous presenters to those asked by attendees who raise their hands in real-time.
Teams Premium for webinars
With the following Microsoft Teams Premium features, you can make your webinar support robust and customize events according to the company theme.
Custom user policy packages
Using Microsoft Teams, you can now make your own unique sets of policies and procedures. You can create a custom policy package to group together a set of policies that apply to users who share similar roles within your organization.
IT admins can now create policy packages specifically tailored to the needs of individuals that share similar job functions within the company.
Microsoft Teams’ policy packages are collections of pre-made policies and policy settings that you can apply to groups of users with similar responsibilities.
All users assigned to the package will automatically receive the updated policy settings whenever you make changes to the package’s policies. You can manage policy packages from both the Microsoft Teams Admin Center and PowerShell.
It’s possible to develop comprehensive policy packages in the Teams Admin Center after logging in. Select “Add” from the menu to build your own coverage options. After giving your bundle a title and description, you can choose the policies you want to include by clicking on their boxes.
Customize the lobby waiting room with themes and logos
Teams allow you to add your own logo, background, and theme to your meetings, making them more personal.
Branding services allow businesses to incorporate their logo and other identifying elements into the meeting preparation, waiting area, and presentation phases. Those with a Teams Premium license can set up branded meetings automatically. By default, all attendees of these meetings will be able to view the meeting’s branding.
Get access to organizational and departmental analytics
Using the Virtual Appointments app in Microsoft Teams, you can quickly see an employee’s schedule thanks to the app’s integration with Bookings and its dashboard. Microsoft Teams Premium adds a preview of the appointment queue, an overview of appointment analytics, and tools for scheduling and managing appointments.
The Virtual Appointments utilization report summarizes your company’s virtual appointment usage in the Analytics menu. Metrics like total appointments, appointment length, lobby wait time, and no-shows are all added in the report.
You can access information regarding specific appointments by drilling down into the data.
Send reminder emails to registrants
Registrants will receive automated reminder emails.
Additionally, you may schedule automated reminder emails to confirm registrants at a time of your choice before the event. These emails will include meeting details, your company’s branded header, and a link to join the event. You may use automatic reminder emails to spread the word at just the right time to generate more interest and attendance for your webinars.
Manually approve registrants
If manual approval is on, as people register, they will appear in Attendee status for organizers to approve or reject.
The current webinar features in Teams are expanded in Teams Premium by adding a manual approval process for new registrants. People can be transferred to the pending approval status as soon as a seat becomes available. This allows the organizer to assess their applications and approve or decline them individually.
Enhanced security options with Microsoft Teams Premium
Teams Premium allows organizations complete control over meetings with the following options.
Prevent copy/paste in meeting chats
Improve the security of your online meetings by using advanced meeting protection features like the ability to prevent copy/paste during the meeting.
Microsoft Teams Premium additionally disables copying conversation items to the clipboard during meetings and presentations.
If a container label specifies a sensitivity label that prevents copying from the chat as its default channel label, all channels within the team will be subject to that sensitivity label’s copying restrictions.
Control who can record
Choosing who can record these meeting choices enables meeting organizers to control who can record their sessions. This is a setting that only the Teams Administrator can change.
Administrators and meeting organizers can control who can record and whether meetings are recorded automatically through meeting templates, sensitivity labels, and organizer settings.
Now, organizers can restrict recording to only confirmed attendees while setting up a Teams meeting. Meeting organizers using either Outlook or Teams can choose to allow recording of their meetings.
End-to-end encryption for meetings with up to 50 attendees
Secure meetings with up to 50 participants are possible thanks to end-to-end encryption on Microsoft Teams Premium.
With end-to-end encryption, the call data is encrypted and decrypted solely by the two endpoint systems. The conversation is encrypted so that not even Microsoft can read it.
Turn on advanced meeting monitoring and alerting
Microsoft has updated the Teams admin center with new monitoring and alerting features. The Teams admin center has a section under “Notifications & alerts” where you can configure various rule sets to monitor the service and get notified of any changes.
The following are some of the things that your business may perform with the help of Teams monitoring and alerting:
- Easily automate control over Team features
- If they display unusual behavior, you should be alarmed.
- Restore order by implementing the necessary course corrections.
Is it worth investing in Microsoft Team Premium?
Microsoft claims that their new Teams Premium plan improves upon the original Teams offering by making all meetings better tailored to the individual attendees and more secure from outside interference.
Many businesses might benefit significantly from the additional features offered by Teams Premium. Those already utilizing Microsoft Teams and having the financial resources should consider making the switch.
Its characteristics allow people to spend less time worrying about their safety and more time focusing on activities that can’t be automated (for now, anyway).
Artificial intelligence is used for this purpose and is part of a more significant movement in the software industry. As it moves towards a sharper focus on how their products might save users time.
Most of the best project management programs already have tools that allow customers to automate their routine operations.
Yet with its Premium update, AI-powered Microsoft Teams, which is incredibly useful and seemingly unstoppable, has shocked the IT world. In other words, change or perish.
If the benefits mentioned above aren’t enough to convince you to upgrade, consider that Microsoft has acknowledged that we will no longer have access to several capabilities with our essential licenses. Such features will now be reserved for people with the Premium license.
Some examples of such tools are real-time caption translation, individualized scenes in Together Mode, timeline markers in recorded Teams meetings, and online scheduling tools.
So, if these functions are crucial to your business, the premium license could be right for you.