NewsUC&C19 Oct 2023 · 3 min read

Major Teams Premium Update Lands to Enhance Collaboration

Microsoft Teams Premium adds Chapters, Topics, Intelligent Recap, webinar emails and admin analytics for better collaboration.

Kieran Devlin

Microsoft has launched a new update for Teams Premium to enhance productivity and collaboration.

Among the new Teams Premium capabilities are the introduction of meeting "Chapters" and "Topics" to Intelligent Recap, expanded language support and new engagement analytics. Also arriving are new webinar capabilities, including customisable email communications, while admins receive new powers, such as automatically enabling background blur for their organisation's meetings and proactively monitoring meeting quality.

Nicole Herskowitz, Vice President at Microsoft Teams, wrote in an accompanying blog post:

The combination of intelligent productivity, engaging experiences, and advanced protection makes Teams Premium the smart place to work. And we’re continuing to innovate across the entire breadth of capabilities so employees can not only keep up, but also thrive in the new era of collaboration."

The New Capabilities in Detail

The new functionalities added to the AI-powered Intelligent Recap, Chapters and Topics, allow easy navigation of meeting recordings.

Teams Premium automatically leverages AI to create Chapters and Topics, dividing the meeting into sections. This means it's simple to identify and select the content or moment the user wants to review. Chapters and topics pinpoint keywords from the meeting transcript or content utilised through PowerPoint Live to dissect the meeting, enabling users to navigate meeting recordings seamlessly.

The Intelligent Recap language support is expanding to include Arabic (Preview), French, German, Hebrew (Preview), Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish. "Coming in November 2023, more people can conduct meetings in their preferred language and get the corresponding AI-generated notes and AI-generated tasks afterwards, so the focus is on the meeting itself and not on note-taking," Herskowitz detailed.

There is also an update to live translated meeting transcripts, and Teams Premium users can now view those meeting transcripts during the meeting on the transcript side pane.

The final update to Intelligent Recap is engagement analytics, which aids meeting organisers in understanding participant interaction to improve outcomes for future meetings. Meeting organisers can assess different kinds of data, including total reactions, raised hands, cameras turned on, chats, and unmutes in the Attendance tab following the meeting.

Teams Premium is adding new webinar capabilities, such as making it simpler to compel attendees to register and join webinars with customisable email communications. "Whether it’s a registration invite, waitlist email, reminder email, or following up with a webinar recording email after the event ends, organisers can edit the content email communications to showcase their brand better and tailor their message for each event," Herskowitz wrote.

As with Intelligent Recap, webinar organisers can leverage the same engagement analytics to understand how content performed and overall event engagement. Organisers can be sent engagement reporting at the individual participant level, encompassing live reactions and raised hands across the webinar, and a summarised view of overall engagement analytics.

Lastly, are the new powers for organisation admins. Admins can improve organization privacy and consistency by automatically enabling background blur for meetings where a participant has not chosen a background or blur option.

Admins can also proactively monitor meeting quality to identify and configure audio, video, and app-sharing-related issues while the meeting is in progress for when connection quality is vital. This monitoring is based on real-time meeting quality telemetry data in the Teams Admin Centre. In the centre, admins can produce a list of rules to monitor critical metrics and receive notifications.

The New Teams App Has Landed

The new Microsoft Teams app is now generally available for Windows and Mac, providing users with the best client performance yet.

It now has full feature parity for nearly all features, such as call queues, PSTN calling, and contextual search in chats and channels. General availability also introduced new features and enhancements, such as seamless cross-tenant communication and collaboration across multiple tenants and accounts.

In March, Microsoft launched the new Teams app in public preview, and it was notable for being twice as fast, with 50 percent less memory usage on Windows than the Teams classic client.