Introduction
Microsoft Teams let’s you communicate, collaborate, and share files with your co-workers, customers, and partners. It also works with other Microsoft and third-party apps, like Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Power BI, to make your work easy across your devices.
But what if you want to take your remote work to the next level? What if you want to host larger and more interactive meetings, access more security options and customise your meeting environment? That’s where Teams Premium comes in.
Teams Premium is the advanced version of Teams that offers more features and benefits for your business. In this article, we will explore some of the superpowers of Teams Premium and how they can help your team achieve more.
Customise your meeting environment
Teams Premium provides the following additional features for customising meetings:
Custom meeting backgrounds for organisations: You can create and define custom meeting backgrounds that are then available to your end users with a Teams Premium license. You can customise the meeting environment with logos, images, and colours to reflect your brand identity and professionalism. You can also customise your camera background with different effects to make your background look neater, more stylish, or more natural, depending on your preference.
Meeting themes: Enables your organisation to apply their visual identities throughout the meeting experience. You can configure and create meeting themes for different business units and departments within a single tenant.
Meeting templates: You can save time and maintain consistency by creating meeting templates with pre-set settings and policies. You can use the default templates, such as standard, education, or healthcare, or design your own custom templates. You can set the meeting options, such as who has the permissions to present, mute, or admit participants, and whether to enable dial-in or lobby access. You can also set the meeting policies, such as who can record, share screen, or chat. You can apply the templates to different users or groups, or let them select their own templates.
RTMP-In for Real Time Messaging Protocol – Organisers can use an external encoder, either hardware or software, to produce their Teams meetings.
Personalised together mode scenes for groups – With a Teams Premium license, you can make, change, or approve custom together mode scenes for meetings that your users can access.
Increase the size and engagement of your meetings
Teams Premium lets you host bigger and more engaging meetings with up to 1,000 participants and 20,000 viewers. You can also stream your meetings to a larger audience with Teams live events. This helps you connect with more people and interact with them using features like polls, Q&A, and live captions.
With Teams Premium you get an enhanced experience with Town Halls and Webinars.
Town Hall – advanced features
Town halls are an innovative way of streaming video interactively. Town halls are designed for communications where the presenters, organisers, and co-organisers are the main drivers of the interactions. The audience mainly participates by watching and responding to the content that is shared.
Teams Premium provides the following features for an enhanced town hall experience:
- Increased broadcast and Q&A capacity– Organisers can broadcast their town halls to 20,000 attendees. All attendees can use Q&A to interact with presenters, organisers, and co-organisers.
- Custom emails – Organisers and co-organisers can customise the town hall email templates sent to attendees.
- Real time monitoring of the attendee experience – Admins can use the analytics dashboard to troubleshoot the attendee experience during live town halls.
- Increased languages for live translations– Attendees have 10 language options for live translated captions in town halls. These languages include:
- English (en-us), Japanese (ja-jp), Spanish (es-es), Portuguese (pt-pt), French (fr-fr), Chinese (zh-cn), German (de-de), Italian (it-it), Korean (ko-kr), Russian (ru-ru)
- Town hall insights – Town hall organisers can troubleshoot town halls while they’re live.
Webinars – advanced features
Webinars provide a two-way interactive virtual event where the presenters deliver information to attendees. This format provides extra control for an organiser over the conversation and participants.
Teams Premium provides the following features for an enhanced webinar experience:
- Custom webinar reminder email send times – Webinar reminder emails are automatically sent to registrants an hour before the event starts. With Teams Premium, organisers can edit the send time to notify attendees sooner.
- Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP)-In – Organisers can produce their Teams webinar directly from an external hardware or software-based encoder.
- Custom emails – Organisers and co-organisers can customise the webinar email templates sent to attendees.
- Manage what attendees see – Webinar organisers can decide whose avatars or video feeds to spotlight during a Teams webinar. Others will be hidden from view.
- Hide attendee names – Meeting and webinar organisers can hide the names of attendees from other attendees in the stage, roster, and chat.
- Manually approve registrants – Organisers can approve or deny requests to register for their webinar.
- Enable and manage the waitlist for webinars beyond capacity – When the webinar’s registration reaches capacity, organisers can manage overflow registration requests through a waitlist.
- Limit registration start and end times – Organisers can set a time window during which potential attendees can register for their webinar.
Virtual Appointments – advanced features
Virtual appointments are for interviews or consultations with external guests, like candidates, customers, or partners. You can make and schedule them with the Teams calendar or the Bookings app. You can email or text a meeting link to the guests, and they can join from any device or browser, no Teams account required. You can also customise the meeting look and features, such as chat, share screen, and recording. You can also use the meeting recap to see and share the meeting results and feedback.
Teams Premium provides advanced Virtual Appointment capabilities, such as:
- Custom waiting room
- SMS notifications
- Analytics
- A queue of scheduled and on-demand appointments
Enhance the security of your meetings
You can make your meetings more secure with end-to-end encryption, watermarks, and more. End-to-end encryption protects your audio and video streams from anyone who might try to access or change them. Watermarks show your name and email address on the meeting screen, making it less likely that someone will record or share the meeting without consent.
Advanced security features:
- Watermarking – Enforced by a sensitivity label. Watermarks show the email address of a meeting attendee, which is helpful for safeguarding confidential information shared in meetings.
- End-to-end encryption – Enforced through a sensitivity label. End-to-end encryption provides increased security for meetings that require a higher level of protection.
- Sensitivity labels – Enhanced features for sensitivity labels to regulate meeting settings that are usually controlled by the meeting organiser. These features include new settings to manage lobby, chat, chat copy, presentation, and recording functions.
- Live data collection and storage – Live data is automatically collected for all users who have a Teams Premium license and stored for seven days.
- Control the attendee view – Meeting organisers can choose whose avatars or video streams to feature during a Teams meeting. The rest will not be visible.
- Conceal attendee identities – Meeting and webinar hosts can prevent the names of attendees from being visible to other attendees in the stage, roster, and chat.
- Advanced collaboration analytics – In the Teams admin center, Teams admins can view data on their users, teams, federated domains, channels, and guests concerning their external collaboration activity.
Conclusion
Teams Premium is the ultimate solution for your remote work needs. It gives you more features and benefits for your meetings and security. It helps you boost your productivity, collaboration, and security with your team. It also helps you create a professional and personalised meeting environment for your audience. It is a powerful tool that can help you unlock the superpowers of your team.
If you would like to discuss Teams Premium further, please get in touch.
