Microsoft Ignite 2022: Microsoft Teams Premium

This year at Microsoft Ignite 2022, Microsoft announced its offering of a new SKU add-on for Microsoft Teams that rolls all the add-ons and costly multiple-point products into one package. The Microsoft Teams Premium package provides a better way to meet in our various work environments. Teams Premium redefines how meetings are organized and conducted, how meetings are presented with specialized devices, where teams members can meet whether in-person, virtual, or in a hybrid environment, how team members can chat and collaborate, how team members can easily access the contact information through the contact center while using a Teams mobile phone, how collaboration is improved with collaborative apps, and how frontline workers benefit from F-SKUs.

Microsoft Teams Premium: Meetings

Meeting Guides

With Meeting Guides, organizers can easily create, schedule, and track meetings with preset options, thereby saving time by negating the need to drill down through menus of options to customize for each meeting. Examples of preset meeting options, which can be customized and itemized by IT, include brainstorming meetings, client calls, and help desk calls. With preset meeting guides, leaders and managers have confidence that company policies and best practices are being followed.

Custom Meeting Branding

Company branding has now reached across and is available in Teams Premium. Customized branding includes company logos and colours that can be infused into the Teams lobby and the background of the meeting. These custom backgrounds are managed by IT at the organizational level, ensuring that corporate branding policies are adhered to. Custom scenes can be created for the Together mode with Teams Premium.

Advanced Meeting Protection

For presenters and attendees in meetings, it is not unusual to share content and knowledge, but many times the content, data, and knowledge may contain business-sensitive information which should not be freely shared during the conversation or screen-shared. With Teams Premium, there are new meeting options to help secure the data and screen grabs with watermarks as well as the capability to limit who can record the meeting.

For customers who require the most advanced security requirements, Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels will automatically apply to relevant meeting options. By choosing the sensitivity label, protection is automatically applied across M365. Existing labels can be edited by compliance admins in the Security and Compliance Centre to enforce the meeting options that need to be applied to sensitivity labels when they are used for a meeting.

Intelligent Recap

With limited hours in a day, attending every meeting we are invited to is next to impossible. What do we do then? With Teams Premium, we can focus on what matters with AI-powered meetings. With the power of AI, intelligent recap acts like a virtual assistant who has attended the meetings on your behalf and will suggest relevant action items. With AI-generated tasks that are suggested during and after the meeting, action items will not be missed.

After a meeting, Intelligent Recap will automatically generate chapters for you to navigate with ease through recordings and help you understand the meeting content that was discussed. These automatically generated chapters will include insights (personalized timeline markers) such as when you left a meeting early, when your name was mentioned, or when there was a screen share.

Searching through transcripts is much more fluid and easier with AI assistance as speakers from the transcript are suggested, and these names are based on who you work most closely with.

Live Translation for Captions

In Microsoft Teams, captioning is available for meetings conducted in English, but with Teams Premium, not only are English captions available, but live translation captioning driven by AI overcomes the language barrier. With the ability to translate 40 spoken languages, live translation for captions provides your audience with immediate translation from English to their native language so they can participate and engage in real-time with other team members.

Advanced Virtual Appointments

Advanced Virtual Appointments in Teams Premium provides you the ability to manage the end-to-end experience for your customer’s appointment. Geared towards business-to-customer (B2C) engagement, Advanced Virtual Appointments help organizations drive operational excellence by providing a customized customer experience with:

1. Virtual Appointments App and Simplified Queue View: with one app, schedule, manage, and track insights for appointments. Client status can easily be tracked and with one view of on-demand and scheduled appointments, they can easily be serviced.
   
2. Custom Waiting Room: external attendees will experience a branded, first-class experience from the very start of joining the meeting.
   
3. Department- and Organizational-Level Analytics: business insights with usage trends can be tracked, including key metrics like wait times and no-shows.
   
4. SMS Reminders and Mobile Browser Join: without the need to download Teams, customers will receive a text reminder to join their virtual appointment, thereby decreasing the number of no-shows.

Microsoft Teams Premium: Advanced Webinars

Microsoft Teams Premium: Advanced Webinars

Taking the basic webinar functionalities in Microsoft Teams to a new level, Advanced Webinars will entice, engage, and communicate with your internal and external audience of up to 1,000 attendees.

1. Registration Waitlist and Manual Approvals: by keeping the webinar registration open even after event capacity has been reached, additional people can register and be placed automatically on the waitlist. As spots come open, these registrants will automatically move to the pending approval state where the organizer can review each registrant’s information and manually approve or reject the registrant. To assist in planning and managing the event, the registration start and end times can be customized.
   
2. Automated Reminder Emails: build anticipation and excitement by sending automated reminder emails to each approved registered attendee. Each email will have a custom-branded header, details of the webinar, and the link to join the event.
   
3. Virtual Green Room: in a dedicated virtual green room that is a separate space from attendees, the host and other presenters can socialize, connect, review content before the event starts, monitor Q&A and chat, and manage attendee settings. On the other side of the virtual green room, attendees will be greeted with a welcome screen and have the opportunity to engage with presenters and each other through the use of chat and Q&A.
   
4. Manage What Attendees See: keep the attendees focused and engaged by managing and curating what they see, such as the presenter, participants that are brought onto the screen, and shared content.

With Teams Premium, the capabilities of Microsoft Teams are elevated to a level of collaboration, communication, workflow, and streamlined process that have not been dreamt of before. Teams Premium brings many new ways to collaborate, share knowledge, and engage the audience in a world of virtual, in-person, internal, and external team members.