What is Microsoft Teams Premium and Who Needs it?

Microsoft Teams Premium is an add-on to Microsoft 365 and brings additional features.

Not everyone will need Teams Premium, but most organisations will find that there people in the organisation who will benefit, especially those who organise virtual and hybrid events or hold sensitive meetings.  As a trainer it’s definitely something that will be of benefit to me.

The features can be seen as falling into 5 categories:

• Meeting Customisation
• Meeting Protection
• Meeting AI Features
• Webinars
• Virtual Appointments

Meeting Customisation features allow organisations to add their own branding to meetings with a branded lobby, customised backgrounds, custom together mode scenes, custom meeting templates, meeting themes plus create and assign custom policy packages for easier administration. 

Meeting Protection features include adding a watermark to videos and shared content to help protect sensitive shared information by adding the email of the attendee so any screenshots taken or video captured shows who took the image/recording.  Sensitivity labels can be used to restrict features in a meeting such as apply watermarking, limiting lobby bypass, restricting recording, preventing copy & paste from chat.

Meeting AI Features are not available in the preview, as at launch.  These include automatically generated chapters in meeting recordings, time markers in meeting recordings showing when you joined/left plus when you were mentioned and the much anticipated auto generated tasks.

Webinars are also getting some new features with a refreshed webinar creation screen rolling out to everyone which includes the ability to limit numbers who can register.  The advanced webinar features with Teams Premium are a green room for presenters only to use prior to meeting start, ability to control which presenters are visible on screen, a wait list for registrations once webinar is at capacity, manually approve registrations and reminder emails to registered attendees.

Virtual Appointments are aimed at businesses who have customers scheduling appointment to be held over Teams.  Premium features in this space do include the SMS notifications, analytics in Teams admin center and scheduled queue view which were previously announced and now only to be in Teams Premium.  Additional features include customised waiting room, chat with attendees in the waiting room and post appointment follow ups.

Some features are licensed by meeting organiser and can be applied to meetings they create, believed to be those set in meeting options, such as adding watermarks and preventing recording.  Other features are per user and only available where the individual is licensed for Teams Premium such as assigning or being assigned custom policy packages.  Many of these details will be confirmed as the preview phase comes to an end.  It should also be noted that Sensitivity Labels for meeting also requires a Microsoft 365 E5 license for the users creating the meetings and assigning the sensitivity label.

Further Reading:

Microsoft Teams Premium licensing including comparison to Microsoft Teams without the Teams Premium add-on

See all my articles on Teams Premium here.