Microsoft Teams Premium - Does your business need it?

If you have an existing Microsoft 365 license, you get Teams included for free, right? This is still correct, but over the last few years Microsoft has continued to roll out different add-on features for Teams at additional license cost; the latest package of which, announced last week at Ignite is Teams Premium. This is a $10 a month add-on which adds some additional features to Teams. We can really break these features down into four categories. 

Manage your meeting participation with AI 

According to Microsoft's 2022 Work Trends Index, our attendance at meetings has increased over 150% since March 2020; so, with more meetings about the work, there may be less time to do the work. This is where the AI tools built into Teams Premium might start to help. 

Intelligent recap uses AI during the meeting, and afterwards in association with the meeting recording, to surface content relevant to you like action items. The meeting recording is more useable as important points like screen sharing are surfaced so you can easily get to the content you need to recap or share. The AI will even recognize when your name is mentioned and highlight that section.  

Microsoft describes this technology like having a virtual assistant in each of your meetings, but also highlights that it might offer the capability to skip meetings altogether. I'm not sure this is the best solution to the marching growth of meeting demands, but it certainly is one. 

In addition, for those who are working in groups where different languages are spoken, real-time translation is now an option. This makes our meetings more inclusive than ever and potentially offers real advantages for Teams to make broader collaboration more achievable.  

Better safeguard your content

Sharing confidential information in a virtual meeting can feel very different to doing so in an in-person meeting where it's a clearer who is recording what information and who exactly can overhear what is being said.

Teams Premium will offer the ability to add additional controls to your meetings for security purposes, such as watermarking video feeds and shared content with the user information of the person receiving that content.

My take on this is that these are useful tools but should probably be used sparingly and with clearly communicated intentions for fear of running into company culture problems or even making those who are virtual meeting attendees in hybrid environments feel like second-class, untrusted, team members. Truly confidential or proprietary information needs to be protected, and these features can help, but it's important to have guard rails that stop misuse to try to keep bad work practices veiled in secrecy.

Develop richer customer connections virtually

Through better integration with Microsoft Bookings and a broader set of features for Teams Webinars you gain additional options for interacting with your customers virtually, either one-on-one or in groups of up to 1,000.

With webinars you gain more features to manage the presenter and attendee experience, you can better control what your attendees see on screen to keep them focused, and you gain additional registration features such as a waitlist and pre-event email reminders.

With Bookings you gain more control over the pre-appointment experience, more capability to brand the online meeting environment, and customers can now join your virtual appointments seamlessly from their mobile browser. You also get enhanced reporting and analytics to better understand your engagement.

Better fit the Teams meeting experience into your business

Elsewhere during Ignite, we learned about Microsoft's focus on the place connected experience with Microsoft Places; while focusing on making in-person and hybrid work experiences function better, Teams Premium offers comparable focus on making virtual engagement and the virtual component of hybrid engagement more tailored for your organization as well.

With new branding options you can customize the meeting experience to your organization, including logos and backgrounds for the Teams lobby, organizational custom backgrounds, and custom scenes for together mode. Take a photo of where you hold in-person all hands meetings and make it a custom together-mode scene, it's not quite bringing your organization into the metaverse, but it'll certainly make your remote workers feel more part of your physical workplace.  

So, who is this for?

If you already use Teams internally within your organization but you opt to use a third-party software like Zoom for your virtual customer connections then the additional features for virtual appointments and webinars might well make this something you want to look at. Compared to Zoom Pro and Zoom Webinars, this isn't exactly feature parity, but you'll be spending between $2.50 and $60 less per user per month to roll in that Teams Premium license versus keeping both a basic Teams and premium Zoom licenses. Similar savings are available across a range of different Teams competitors. If Teams Premium gives you what you need for customer connection, those savings will add up fast even for the most well-resourced IT departments.

The AI functions might be of interest to executives or those who attend a lot of meetings, and particularly those who currently rely upon administrative help to manage that meeting participation and follow-up.  However, we should remember that the AI doesn't participate on your behalf and if a lot of your meetings are simply for you to gather information and actions rather than add value through participation, then maybe many of those meetings could be replaced altogether with other types of communication like asynchronous Teams channels. That said, as someone who finds it difficult to listen, contribute AND take comprehensive notes all at the same time in meetings, I look forward to trying this out.

Certain organizations will immediately want to jump on this because of the added security features. That alone will be worth the additional monthly cost to some because of the types of information they are sharing and the risk associated with it.

Lastly, those organizations that are redesigning themselves to embrace permanent hybrid work may benefit from the additional tools in terms of Teams customization that you get here. I think this will depend on exactly how Meeting Guides work as to how valuable this is to many, but the intention is clear that whether you are in-person, virtual, or hybrid, Microsoft wants to add value to the places where you meet.

In many ways this is a very odd mix of features as many Microsoft add-on licenses are fairly laser focused on a particular set of needs. There are probably few organizations out there where all, or even most, of these features will be perceived to have equal value, and likely you will buy it because one or two features truly are differentiators for your particular needs.

Availability and cost

It is expected that Teams Premium will enter public preview in December before expected general availability starting in February 2023, with some of the new AI features coming later in 2023. It was announced as an add-on license costing an additional $10 per user per month in addition to your existing base Teams license. 

Title image credit: Photo by Devin Pickell on Unsplash. Video: The clips and images used in the video are from Microsoft’s promotional and announcement materials related to Microsoft Teams Premium, they are owned by Microsoft and used here solely to highlight the product.