Microsoft has announced that the Microsoft Teams Premium licence is generally available to all customers following a preview phase.
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The newest licence is designed to offer customers familiar meeting solutions as well as webinars, virtual appointments, meeting intelligence, and more, which are often add-on products.
Nicole Herskowitz, Vice President Microsoft Teams, commented: “As we face economic uncertainties and changes to work patterns, organisations are searching for ways to optimise IT investments and re-energize employees to achieve business results.
“Now—more than ever—organisations need solutions to adapt to change, improve productivity, and reduce costs.
“Fortunately, modern tools powered by AI hold the promise to boost individual, team, and organizational-level productivity and fundamentally change how we work.
“This promise is rapidly becoming a reality. At Microsoft, we’re working to incorporate new, AI-powered capabilities across our consumer and enterprise products, including Microsoft Teams.
“As part of this continuous innovation, I’m excited to share that Microsoft Teams Premium is generally available.
“Built on the familiar, all-in-one collaborative experience of Microsoft Teams, Teams Premium brings the latest technologies, including Large Language Models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, to make meetings more intelligent, personalised, and protected—whether it’s one-on-one, large meetings, virtual appointments, or webinars.”
Features Powered by OpenAI
In January, Microsoft announced that it is extending its long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multi-billion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs.
The company’s partnership with the ChatGPT creator has already been in place since 2019 and will now continue in this multiyear deal as the organisations look to share AI technology with the world.
The partnership extension ensures that Microsoft will be the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI, Microsoft will deploy OpenAI models to its customer base, and Microsoft will increase investments into OpenAI’s independent AI research.
It needs to be clarified how OpenAI’s portfolio would integrate with Microsoft products; however, the Teams Premium licence has infused AI technology throughout the meeting experience.
Using intelligent recap in Teams Premium, users will get automatically generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalised highlights to help get the important information, even if they miss the meeting.
Intelligent recap also saves time reviewing meeting recordings due to AI-generated chapters that divide the meeting into sections.
This makes it easy for users to pick and choose the most relevant content, with the chapters added to the meeting transcript.
In addition to AI-generated chapters, users can access personalised timeline markers to see when they joined or left a meeting within the meeting recording so they can quickly click and listen in on what they missed.
Microsoft has confirmed that it will soon add speaker timeline markers to these personalised meeting highlights that show what users spoke and when during the meeting.
In the coming months, OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 will produce critical points and takeaways after the meeting with AI-generated notes, meaning that users can focus on the meeting discussion.
Microsoft Teams Premium also includes some already-existing AI features, such as live translations, which give users real-time translations from 40 spoken languages in caption form.
Meeting participants can read captions in their language, and only the meeting organiser needs a Teams Premium licence for all attendees to use the feature.
Personalised for Each Organisation
With the Teams Premium licence, Microsoft is making it possible for users to customise their meetings to be unique for their organisation.
Teams Premium allows users to host branded meetings to let all participants see the logo and colours of their company.
During the meeting, users can enable branded-approved organisation backgrounds and an ‘organisation together mode’ scene to further promote the company’s branding and identity.
Microsft has confirmed that branded meetings will be available to all users by mid-February.
With Teams Premium, IT admins can create customised meeting templates to automatically include the correct settings to get meetings right for their specific organisation.
Microsoft has also allowed IT admins to create custom user policy packages so time can be saved by creating a customised bundle of policies for users with similar roles.
Protected Meetings
Teams Premium has advanced meeting protection to ensure that meetings can be upgraded to include safeguards for confidential business meetings without impacting the meeting experience.
The licence comes with more meeting options, such as watermarking to deter leaks and also the ability to limit who can record the discussion.
IT-enabled users can also activate end-to-end encryption for meetings of a compassionate nature.
Microsoft 365 E5 customers with Teams Premoum will also have access to Microsoft Purview Information Protection.
This means that meeting organisers can leverage sensitivity labels to automatically apply the most relevant and essential meeting options based on the sensitivity of the meeting content.
Admins can configure the feature in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal to determine which meeting options should be enforced if a label is used within a meeting.
Virtual Appointments
A new licence means a new meeting type, and as a result, Virtual Appointments are available to Microsoft Teams Premium users.
Virtual Appointments in Teams will be tailored for business-to-customer (B2C) meetings with people outside your organisation.
The new meeting allows external attendees to join virtual, branded lobby rooms through text messages or emails on any device browser.
Admins can set up and manage scheduled and on-demand virtual appointments in one location with advanced capabilities like appointment queuing.
The business value of virtual appointments can also be measured with department-level or organisation-level analytics on customer metrics such as wait times and no-show rates.
Webinars
In the hybrid working environment, webinars communicate new product launches, round tables, organisation-wide training, and more.
Usually, organisations require an add-on to host these events; however, with Teams Premium, webinars are included in the licence.
Webinars in Teams allow presenters to join a virtual green room as preparation before the webinar is easy and seamless.
The virtual green room allows presenters to connect and hold a quick briefing or test run without disturbing the event’s attendees.
During the webinar, presenters can more effectively manage what attendees see by using host controls to produce professionally-looking events.
Registration for webinars can be customised to include a registration waitlist and manual approval, along with the ability to edit registration start and end times for better event management.
Users can integrate external media feeds into webinars by using RTMP-in to live stream a custom RTMP source to deliver more dynamic content to all event attendees.
Microsoft Teams Premium also allows users to send automated reminder emails to help promote and drive attendance for the event.
These emails can be sent to every confirmed resistant at a configured time set ahead of the event and include a custom-branded header, webinar details, and a link to join the event.
Microsoft has stated that webinar capabilities are available now, except for automated email reminders, which will be available in March 2023.
Microsoft eCDN
Microsoft is allowing Teams Premium users to improve live event experiences within an organisation by including its Microsoft Enterprise Content Deliver Network (eCDN) within the licence.
The solution allows organisations to seamlessly and securely live stream global meetings, all-hands gathers, town halls, and more using Teams Live Events.
The eCDN helps reduce the corporate network load, prevents connectivity failure, improves video quality, and doesn’t require additional installation on user endpoints and devices.
Pricing
Microsoft is offering users the ability to try Microsoft Teams Premium for free for 30 days before July 1, 2023.
Teams Premium will cost $7 per user per month until July 1, when the price rises to $10 per user per month.
