Your organization might already be using Microsoft Teams for all of your office communications, but you might not have heard of Teams Premium. It’s an offering from Microsoft that contains a few serious features for stepping up your company’s branding and productivity, including some AI features that streamline the process of creating webinars, help you communicate with your international team, and give you advanced analytics on your Teams usage. Today we’ll take a look at some of these premium features and help you decide if your organization is ready for Teams Premium.
Managing appointments
Personally, I find the experience of scheduling Teams meetings in Outlook to be adequate, but sometimes it seems to lack basic features. For example, I have a tough time scheduling a meeting with more than just a couple members of my team without an email discussion or chain of texts about when everyone is free. This is, of course, because I don’t have access to my whole organization’s calendars in Outlook (which is good!). Teams Premium does boast a unified calendar for your organization that can display all of your organization’s appointments in one place, which makes it possible to get the right meeting time without the timesuck of emailing back-and-forth.
For your external-facing meetings, you get two powerful features that help ensure that your appointments are kept by the customer or client: 1) SMS text message reminders, and 2) custom branded virtual appointments. The first helps by reaching your meeting attendees via text message, which might help you catch them with a potent reminder even when things get busy for them.
The second allows attendees to join your meetings without a Teams app on their mobile device. Both of these can help you get appointments started on time and with as little hassle as possible. The customized branding doesn’t stop with the standalone meetings either: with Teams premium, you can add your brand and a splashy background to the lobby of your meetings as well.
Webinars
Beyond just appointments, Teams Premium have a few features that are specific to webinars and more polished forms of presenting information. The technical demands of a webinar can be slightly different than a meeting, where you expect everyone to participate more or less equally. In a webinar, it becomes necessary to focus the attention of your (larger) audience and cut down on distractions. To do this, Teams Premium offers the ability to specify what attendees are viewing and manage shared content in a more specific way.
With the ability to invite up to 1000 users to Teams Premium webinars, you’ll need some help organizing and registering attendees for the webinar. For this, Microsoft have added registration workflows that can enable waitlisting on a register that has specific start and end times. This set of features probably caters most to the enterprise-level world, but small- and medium-sized businesses might benefit from these prebuilt tools for organization too.
Security
For an organization of any size, security is a primary concern for any communications platform. For 365 E5 customers, Teams Premium integrates with some features of Microsoft Purview to streamline the categorization of sensitive data. This means that meeting options can be tidied up based on the nature of the information you tend to share in the meeting: your compliance administration can decide what options are available in meetings that have a specific security label applied to it.
Some of these features would be screen sharing, recording, and transcription, all of which can create a possibility that a misplaced file will result in a data leak. If your meeting needs to stay confidential, labeling can help mitigate the risk of a leak. Another feature aimed at deterring leaks is a watermark feature for recorded meetings.
AI features
And of course, one of the biggest reasons to have recording enabled in Teams meetings is to take advantage of some of the AI technologies that Microsoft offers as part of Copilot-branded products. Given Microsoft’s typical approach-to slap the Copilot name on everything, from Bing to Office-it’s kind of a surprise that the Copilot name doesn’t show up here in Teams Premium. It does, however, offer a lot of the same functionality as Copilot for 365 (in Teams).
With the AI features from Teams Premium, meeting attendees can ask for an Intelligent Recap in the meeting, look at an AI-generated summary of a finished meeting, and even watch real-time transcriptions as subtitles if a different language is being spoken. These are really important features for how meetings work these days: creating a list of action items at the end of a meeting is not just good for keeping track of your responsibilities following a meeting, but knowing that you have that list being delivered by AI lets you talk openly and creatively during the meeting instead of taking notes and worrying about jotting everything down as it happens.
These features would be worth the jump to Teams Premium alone, but how does it compare to the Copilot features that are so similar?
Deciding between Teams Premium’s AI and Copilot for 365
If you were interested in the custom branding or centralized management for appointments that Teams Premium offers, then you could probably see the value of those features on their own. For $7/month per user, Teams Premium is a really good deal for those extended management features. If you need heightened security because of the nature of your industry and compliance requirements, it’s also a pretty easy sell.
If, on the other hand, you weren’t sold on those features, you could probably still justify it on the grounds of the AI features alone. Copilot for 365 is $30/user per month and will give you (most of) the same AI meeting features. Instead of Intelligent Recap, as mentioned above, Copilot can just be asked to recap the meeting so far; Copilot can be asked to present a list of action items at the end of a meeting as well.
Really, the question here isn’t as much about Teams Premium as it is about what you get with Copilot for 365… which is the rest of the Copilot features across 365. If you need Copilot in Word (specifically, and not just a standalone GPT), PowerPoint, Excel, Loop, and the rest of 365, that’s where you’ll find the value in a Copilot license. If you live in OneDrive or SharePoint for most of your documents, Copilot can absolutely make itself worthwhile if you explore some of the workflows that it makes the most sense for.
Copilot in Teams, however, is-by far-our favorite integration in the Copilot experience, and the one that we get the most use out of for revisiting meetings, getting summaries and transcribed notes after the meeting, and turning our meeting recaps into action items. Simply put, the Teams Premium license is attractive less for what it can do in the AI space and more because it has the same features as Copilot with a much smaller price point.
-Written by Derek Jeppsen on Behalf of Sean Goss and Crown Computers Team