What you need to know
- Microsoft Teams Premium is now available in preview.
- IT admins can now set up a 30-day free trial of Microsoft Teams Premium.
- The tier of Teams adds options for personalizing meetings, catching up through AI tools, and improving security.
- Teams Premium is currently scheduled to become generally available in February 2023.
Microsoft Teams Premium is now available in preview. Admins can set up a 30-day trial for the add-on for free through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Teams Premium is currently set to ship in February 2023, so organizations have a couple of months to try the add-on out before it becomes generally available. When it does ship, it is expected to cost $10 per user per month.
Announced earlier this year, Microsoft Teams Premium is an add-on that adds options for personalization and branding, improves security, and provides AI tools for enhancing meetings.
Teams Premium users can have 40 spoken languages translated into captions, use templates for webinars, and brand their meetings. The subscription also provides tools to streamline the webinar experience and protect meetings with advanced security tools.
Some Teams Premium features are not available in preview at this time. Custom branding for meetings should ship to preview users in January 2023. Intelligent recap for meetings is also on the way, but Microsoft did not specify a timeline for it.
Microsoft has an extensive Tech Community post that breaks down every feature with a full set of details and screenshots. The company also shared a list of highlights, noting that with Teams Premium you can:
- Extend your organization’s brand and company culture across meetings with branding, organization backgrounds, and organization together mode scenes.
- Use AI to make the meetings you attend (and miss) more productive and impactful through live translation for captions to remove language barriers and intelligent recap features that offer smarter recordings with autogenerated chapters, AI-suggested action items, and insights to quickly catch up on missed meetings where your name was mentioned.
- Apply advanced meeting protection such as Watermark, End-to-end encryption for meetings, and Sensitivity labels for meetings with prevent copy/paste of meeting chat to better protect your virtual meetings.
- Deliver a high-quality webinar experience through advanced capabilities to streamline event workflows with registration waitlist and manual approval, facilitate behind-the-scene actions through virtual green room for presenters (separate from attendees) before the event begins, and manage the attendee experience so they only see shared content and participants brought on-screen.
- Manage the end-to-end virtual appointment experience with advanced features like text reminders, custom branded virtual appointments, and a centralized Virtual Appointment dashboard for a quick view into schedules, queues, and analytics to keep track of key usage insights such as no-shows and wait time information per appointment.
A separate post from Microsoft explains the license requirements to purchase Teams Premium. To obtain a subscription, a user must be a commercial, worldwide public sector, EDU, GCC, or non-profit tenant. GCC High and DoD tenants will not be able to purchase Teams Premium licenses when the subscription launches in February 2023. Microsoft also notes that there won't be an EDU-specific license for Teams premium at launch or special pricing for tenants in education.
Microsoft breaks down the steps to sign-up for a trial to help people try the add-on.
