What are the difference between Teams and Teams Premium?

The following table compares key features between Teams and Teams Premium:

 

 

* Mentions of a user's name is pulled from the meeting transcript, not from an @mention tag in the meeting chat.

 

* Mentions of a user's name is pulled from the meeting transcript, not from an @mention tag in the meeting chat.

 

What is Microsoft Teams Premium?

Microsoft Teams Premium is an add-on available with a subscription to Microsoft Teams Premium. This add-on elevates the Teams experience with a host of new features that provide an all-new level of security, and personalization, with the infusion of AI capabilities and more intelligence. 

1. Protected meetings boost security instantly 

Watermarks

You can use sensitivity labels to enforce watermarks. A watermark is a faint picture or text that appears as an overlay on the content to protect the confidentiality of visual content shared during a meeting. You can use watermarks to have branded meetings that discourage unauthorized screenshots of sensitive content with an overlay that displays the name or email address of each meeting participant. This makes it obvious to attendees that information leaks of sensitive information can be traced back to their source.

There are a couple of different configurations for setting up your watermarks, which by the way, must be set up before your meeting begins:

• If you apply a watermark to shared content, the ability to record the meeting or use the together mode, large gallery view, PowerPoint Live, the Whiteboard, and shared content from cameras will all be disabled.
• If you apply a watermark to everyone’s video feed, the ability to record the meeting, or use the together mode or large gallery view will be disabled.
  
  

Encrypted video and audio

Microsoft uses industry standards to secure all Teams meetings, regardless of whether you use the Teams Premium add-on or not. However, Teams Premium provides an extra layer of protection to your meetings with real-time, end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to protect the flow of voice and video data.  

E2EE isn’t enabled by default within Teams Premium, but you can enable it in a couple of different ways. You can enable it with a Teams admin-enhanced encryption policy or you can use a sensitivity label or a custom meeting template to automatically enforce end-to-end encryption on meetings that require additional protection. Once enabled, meeting organizers will see the encryption option when they set up their Teams meetings.

2. Intelligent meetings

Microsoft Teams Premium makes your meetings smarter with an intelligent recap feature that uses the OpenAI GPT model to capture meeting notes and highlights for every meeting. The productivity gains here are significant. Meeting participants can spend more time listening and sharing and less time taking notes.

At the end of the meeting, everyone gets a recording that the AI has analyzed and broken into meeting chapters with highlights of key information shared during the meeting. Teams Premium also adds personalized timeline markers, visible only to you, that note when you joined or left the meeting. So, if you weren’t able to attend, arrived late, or left early, you can quickly get up to speed on what you missed.

3. Smarter Teams live events and webinar features

Microsoft Teams Webinars has always supported webinar registration and tracking. New Teams Premium extends these capabilities with advanced registration features such as:

• Waitlisting—This feature gives you the ability to specify the timeframe for the registration and waitlisting, which automatically puts anyone who wants to register after the registration period has closed onto a waitlist. As slots open up, the organizer can review their registrations and manually approve/reject them on an individual basis.
  
  
  
  
• Registration Summaries—For each event, organizers can also get a summary of registration status showing attendees in different registration states. This allows organizers to better manage the registration process and see who they might need to follow up with to complete it.
  
  
  
  
• Virtual Green Room—Another cool feature is the virtual green room. It allows presenters to get together behind the scenes of the event in a dedicated space separate from attendees. This allows presenters to easily manage and collaborate throughout the event to make it a smooth experience for their attendees.
  
• Customization Options—Teams Premium also elevates the webinar experience with customization options such as the ability to add presenter bios and elements of your organization’s visual branding. Presenters can also configure the attendee view to provide a distraction-free environment. You can configure your settings to show only the content and participants you bring on-screen so that attendees don’t see when others leave the event or lose their video mid-stream.
  
  

4. Custom meeting templates, themes, and guides to work the way you do

With Teams Premium, you can create meeting templates to simplify governance by automatically enforcing compliance and business rules, which are normally the responsibility of the meeting organizer.

By automating these controls with a template, you can eliminate the possibility that the organizer might forget to set the necessary controls for sensitive meetings. 

The premium add-on also helps you level up your Teams meeting experience with custom meeting themes.

 

With custom meeting themes, you can create a branded meeting experience by adding custom backgrounds featuring your organization’s brand images, colors, and logo. The ability to create meeting themes can be extended to all the different business units within your tenant, allowing people to create their own custom meeting experience.     

New meeting guides available in Teams Premium allow you to quickly set up meetings customized to your needs, such as one-on-one discussions or brainstorming sessions with a larger group. Meeting guides must be customized and managed by IT and end users. Their primary purpose is to save meeting organizers time in setting up the options they need for different types of meetings. With meeting guides, organizers can select from those available to them and have the guide set up the meeting automatically.

5. Advanced virtual appointments and virtual meetings features

The standard version of Teams, available with any Microsoft 365 license, provides the ability to schedule and join virtual appointments with internal and external attendees through the Bookings calendar.

Teams Premium streamlines and enhances virtual appointments with advanced capabilities, including SMS notifications, a custom waiting room, and a queue of scheduled and on-demand appointments that prevents double-booking and shows all virtual appointments in one place. 

You also get analytics with the add-on that allows you to view usage trends and history with metrics such as no-shows, how much time a participant had to spend in the waiting room, meeting duration, and more.

This information, which is available at the individual or department levels, can help you measure how virtual appointments are driving value in your business and identify any issues that may be impacting meeting outcomes.   

How can I get Microsoft Teams Premium for my department?