Microsoft Teams Premium significantly improves the use of Teams in meetings. Read more about the useful features of Teams Premium.

Microsoft Teams Premium is Microsoft’s latest product, offering users a cost-effective way to collaborate with colleagues, partners, and customers while offering advanced security and compliance measures to keep data and conversations safe.

AI-generated notes and summary

One of the most useful features of Teams Premium is its AI-generated notes and summary. This feature allows teams to quickly create summaries of meetings and discussions for later reference or sharing with other teams.

Artificial intelligence automatically creates meeting notes, recommended tasks and action items, and personal highlights as a summary of the meeting. This feature saves teams time and energy while ensuring everyone stays up-to-date.

The AI summary functionality also helps save time with automatically generated breakdowns when viewing meeting recordings. This feature makes it easier to review conversations and find the information the user needs.

Markings in transcripts of meeting recordings

Teams Premium offers personalized timeline annotations on transcripts that indicate in the meeting recording when you joined or left the meeting. You can quickly locate the points and listen to what you missed with the help of the markings.

The functionality includes markings of when your name was mentioned and when the screen was shared, as well as timeline markers of different speakers, which will allow you to go directly to the content they presented in the recording.

Real-time translations of subtitles

Teams Premium also offers real-time translation of subtitles, which facilitates communication between teams. This feature uses real-time translation technology in 40 languages to convert conversations into the speaker’s language so everyone understands what’s being said.

This feature makes it easy for teams to communicate and collaborate without having to worry about language barriers. This saves money and makes meetings more productive and effortless.

Only the meeting organizer needs to have a Teams Premium license for all meeting participants to take advantage of the functionality.

Meeting guides

Teams Premium’s meeting guides allow the organization’s IT management to define different types of meetings, for example, for a customer call, a creative brainstorming meeting, or a help desk call. These predefined meetings have the right settings already selected, reducing the time and effort required to create and organize a meeting.

Organizations can use meeting guides to ensure that meetings follow the company’s best practices.

Meetings according to the organization’s brand

Teams Premium also offers branded meetings, allowing teams to customize their meetings to match their brand. This feature allows teams to add their organization’s logo and custom backgrounds and colors to their meetings. The backgrounds of the together mode used in meetings can also be modified to look like your own brand.

This allows teams to create a professional and branded experience and makes it easier to identify and track meetings.

Features that make organizing webinars easier

Teams Premium helps make organizing webinars easier when presenters can join a virtual waiting room, where presenters have time and space to connect and do a quick test run without disturbing the participants. In this way, the preparation before the webinar runs smoothly.

Registration for webinars improves from the organizers’ point of view with the registration waiting list and manual approval. In addition, the registration start and end times can be adjusted. Automated reminder emails to each confirmed registrant help ensure attendees remember to join the webinar.

Presenters also have better control over what attendees see. Instead of the list of participants, the view focuses only on the presented content and the presenter. The RTMP feed allows the presenter to integrate various external media feeds into the webinar.

Features for better information security

Teams Premium also offers features that promote data security, such as:

• user group-specific security policy packages
• confidentiality tags
• meeting protections for confidential virtual meetings.

The organization’s IT department can define security policy packages for different user groups or departments. For example, working with external suppliers may require more restrictive meetings or communication practices.

Appropriate meeting, messaging, and application policies can be assigned to user groups in a simple and streamlined process with custom policy packages, which saves time and ensures consistent data management across the organization.

Additional security is also provided by Microsoft Purview Information Protection confidentiality tags, which can be used by Microsoft 365 E5 customers with Teams Premium. In this case, meeting organizers automatically receive the most relevant and important meeting options based on the confidentiality of the meeting content.

Sensitive information and content, such as board meetings, financial discussions, or unpublished product reviews, remain safe with the additional protection offered by Teams Premium.

New meeting options, such as watermarking screen sharing and presentation to prevent leaks and restricting recorders, give you extra protection to keep your conversation private. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) can also be used in meetings that require disabling core meeting features for an advanced encryption option.

More efficient meeting work

Microsoft Teams Premium offers a set of features that give companies a competitive edge in the market. From AI-powered notes and summaries to meeting guides and real-time translation, Teams Premium offers everything you need to stay up-to-date, whether you’re in the meeting or not.

With Teams Premium, companies can collaborate and communicate more efficiently, while saving time and money, as various additional programs are no longer needed.

Read more about all the features offered by Teams Premium on Microsoft’s blog: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/02/01/microsoft-teams-premium-cut-costs-and-add-ai-powered-productivity/

Henry Scheinin
Leading consultant, Partner