Teams Premium is a set of new features that are being introduced by Microsoft to provide users with a more seamless and efficient way to work and collaborate on the Microsoft Teams platform. These new features will provide a number of new capabilities and improvements to the platform, including enhanced security for meetings, meeting templates, and enhanced webinar capabilities. Microsoft also introduced a new Teams Premium license which covers all those features.
New license
The Teams Premium license is the biggest licensing change since Teams was released. It will give you many advanced security features for meetings and webinars, meeting templates, more reporting capabilities, and much more. Some of those features are available as a preview and some are still under development and will be available in the next couple of months.
The license is available as a preview, and you can enable it on your tenant for 30 days (as a trial). You can assign licenses to some users and test features that are enabled today. Some of them will come in weeks or months but there is no strict date. The availability date and price for the final Teams Premium is also not yet released.
Meetings features
Features related to meetings (scheduled, channel, and ad-hoc meetings).
One of the most significant features is the ability to create a custom meeting template. You can create a template with specific settings (for example, enabled auto-recording, and disabled the mic and camera for attendees). The template will be available from the Teams client or the Outlook application, so you don’t need to modify manually meeting settings each time. That’s a great feature for repeating meetings that required custom settings.
Full list of new features:
| Feature | Status |
| Customize meeting templates for your organization | available |
| Add organization branding to meeting lobbies | available |
| Customize meeting backgrounds for your organization | available |
| Customize Together mode scenes for your organization | available |
| Read live translated captions during meetings | available |
| Translate post-meeting transcriptions | coming soon |
| Turn on real-time data storage | available |
| Turn on eCDN for Live Events | available |
Webinars features
Those features give a huge boost to the webinar interface and presenter capabilities. A new dedicated lobby for webinars (Green Room), a new configuration form, an approval process for attendees, a limit registration date, and more.
Full list of features:
| Feature | Status |
| Set up a green room for webinar presenters | available |
| Manage attendees’ view | available |
| Send reminder emails to registrants | available |
| Create a webinar wait list | available |
| Manually approve registrants | available |
| Limit the day and time when people can register | available |
| Allow registered users to bypass the lobby | available |
| Use RTMP-In for Webinars | coming soon |
Meetings protection features
Features related to security are always welcome. Teams Premium will give tools to protect meetings and additional reporting capabilities. For example, watermarks add marks (user email address) on video and shared content to protect it from making unauthorized screenshots or recordings. End-to-end encrypted meetings allow users to secure their meetings and protect their conversations by encrypting the data from the user’s device to the recipient’s device.
Full list of features
| Feature | Status |
| Add watermarks to meetings | available |
| End-to-end encryption for meetings with up to 50 attendees | available |
| Control who can record | available |
| Prevent copy/paste in meeting chats | available |
| Assign Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels for meetings | available for users with M365 E5 |
| Custom user policy packages | available |
| Turn on advanced meeting monitoring and alerting | available |
Meetings reporting features
Features that help you with your post-meeting tasks. Auto-generated chapters from recordings, advanced search in meeting transcripts, and task auto-generation, just to name a few. Most of the features will be powered by dedicated AI models.
Full list of features.
| Feature | Status |
| Navigate meeting recordings with autogenerated chapters | coming soon |
| View time markers in meeting recordings when you joined or left a meeting | coming soon |
| Search meeting transcripts with speaker suggestions | coming soon |
| View and act on autogenerated tasks from meetings | coming soon |
| View when you were @mentioned | available |
Virtual Appointments features
This section covers features such as SMS notifications, custom waiting rooms, or advanced virtual appointment activity reports. With those features, you will get new tools to work with appointments and monitor them.
Full list of features:
| Feature | Status |
| Customize the lobby waiting room with themes and logos | available |
| Send SMS notifications | available |
| Chat back and forth with attendees in the lobby waiting room | coming soon |
| Organizational and departmental analytics | available |
| View and manage scheduled appointments in the queue | available |
| View and manage on-demand appointments in the queue | available |
| Send post-appointment follow-ups | coming soon |
Activating a trial license
The Team Premium is available as a trial license so you can activate it and test available features.
1. Go to Microsoft 365 Admin Center (https://admin.microsoft.com/)
2. Navigate to Billing and then to the Purchase services section
3. Search for Teams Premium and activate it.
4. If you can’t find it on the page, you can use this link – https://aka.ms/tpdlnk. It will open the activation page when you must provide your e-mail address.
5. Activate the license
6. Assign the license to the specific users
Changes to existing Teams license
Teams Premium is not only about new features. It’s also about changing existing ones!
Microsoft will move the following features from the current Teams license to the premium one:
- Â Live translated captions
- Timeline markers in Teams meeting recordings for when a user left or joined meetings
- Custom organization Together mode scenes
- Virtual Appointments: SMS notifications
- Virtual Appointments: Organizational analytics in the Teams admin center
- Virtual Appointments: Scheduled queue view
When the Premium License will be released you will get a 30-day grace period to purchase Teams Premium or your users will lose access to those features.
Summary
Teams Premium gives many new features for security, meetings, and other areas. It moves Teams meetings and webinars to a new level. The best way to check if you need those features is to activate the trial license to check them. It’s also very important to review those features that will be moved to the premium license.
