At its annual Ignite event, Microsoft said it would launch Teams Premium as a preview in December. It has kept its promise by launching the service for its commercial customers. Microsoft Teams Premium preview is now broadly available with a free 30-day free trial. Seekers can try the service through Microsoft 365 admin center without paying a fee.
Teams Premium is essentially an add-on inside Microsoft Teams and has more personalization, AI functionality, and security features built-in. With the premium service, Microsoft is aiming to make virtual meetings more personalized, intelligent, and secure. The company has listed as many as five features Teams Premium users can try right now, which reads as follows:
- 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.
In its official blog post, Microsoft also said that the features under the Teams Premium offering would continue to roll out through January next year. If things go as planned, Microsoft Teams Premium will be generally available in February 2023 and will cost $10 per user per month.
Microsoft has posted a detailed how-to video, which you can watch above, covering everything about the new Teams Premium add-on, from discussing how to set it up to guiding you through how to use Premium features.