Microsoft Teams Premium: The smart place to work is also a smart investment

Nicole Herskowitz, Vice President, Microsoft Teams

October 18, 2023

As the pace and volume of work increases, employees are struggling to keep up. The constant inflow of emails, notifications, and meetings has outpaced our ability to process it all. Sixty-eight percent of employees say they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday resulting in a huge opportunity cost for their organizations.¹ Yet the demand for our time is only increasing, with a 252 percent increase in weekly time spent in meetings since February 2020.²

Microsoft Teams Premium is built for the new way of work. In the nine months since its release, Teams Premium has helped organizations such as Clifford Chance and Sulava address these challenges with advanced collaboration capabilities that help lift the weight of time-consuming tasks so employees can focus on higher-value work.

Microsoft Teams Premium

Make every meeting more intelligent, engaging, and protected with Teams Premium.

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Save time and money with Teams Premium

In a recently commissioned study, Forrester Consulting found that organizations saved 50 to 90 percent of time used to catch up on missed meetings by using AI-powered intelligent recap in Teams Premium. Organizations also see time savings with meeting templates and virtual appointments, improved security through advanced protection capabilities, and avoided costs of software licenses—all contributing to a projected return on investment of 108 to 360 percent over three years.³

Study participants turned to Teams Premium to reduce costs, drive better customer experiences, and give employees an easy way to leverage AI to be more effective in their daily work—and Teams Premium delivered.

To learn more, read The Total Economic Impact™ of Teams Premium study.

Teams Premium: The smart place to work

The combination of intelligent productivity, engaging experiences, and advanced protection makes Teams Premium the smart place to work. And we’re continuing to innovate across the entire breadth of capabilities so employees can not only keep up, but also thrive in the new era of collaboration.

Make meetings more productive and engaging

Intelligent recap makes the meetings you attend—and the ones you miss—more productive and impactful. Given the amount of time spent in meetings, Teams helps you optimize your time by quickly catching up on discussions and capturing key points and next steps. Using the power of AI, Teams makes it easy to navigate recordings with the automatic creation of chapters and topics in intelligent recap. Chapters and topics divide the meeting into sections so it’s easy to jump right to the content or moment you would like to review. Chapters and topics identify keywords from the meeting transcript, or content shared with PowerPoint Live, to segment the meeting, helping you quickly navigate meeting recordings.

graphical user interface, text, website — *Figure 1. Automatically generated chapters and topics help you quickly find the information you need.*

To support customers globally, we are excited to share that we are expanding intelligent recap language support to Arabic (Preview), French, German, Hebrew (Preview), Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish. Coming in November 2023, more people can conduct meetings in their preferred language and get the corresponding AI-generated notes and AI-generated tasks afterward, so the focus is on the meeting itself and not on note-taking.

For organizations whose teamwork spans geographies, we are continuously investing in technology that removes language barriers. Currently, Teams Premium users can read live translated meeting captions in their preferred language. Now, people can also view live translated meeting transcripts during the meeting on the transcript side pane.

Improving engagement and efficacy of meetings doesn’t stop when the meeting ends. New engagement analytics helps meeting organizers understand attendee interaction to improve outcomes for future meetings. Meeting organizers can view data such as total reactions, raised hands, cameras turned on, chats, and unmutes in the Attendance tab after the meeting. Understanding attendee behavior is critical to driving better experiences, from small team meetings to large presentations.

*Figure 2. Engagement analytics help meeting organizers better understand audience interactions and improve future meetings.*

Create richer webinar experiences to grow your business

To help grow your business and drive lead generation, we’re introducing new webinar capabilities in Teams Premium.

We’re making it easier to entice attendees to register and join your webinars with customizable email communications. Whether it’s a registration invite, waitlist email, reminder email, or following up with a webinar recording email after the event ends, organizers can edit the content email communications to better showcase their brand and tailor their message for each event.

graphical user interface, application, website — *Figure 3. Attract attendees with timely customizable email communications that showcase your brand.*

As mentioned above, webinar organizers can leverage the same engagement analytics to assess how content performed and understand overall event engagement. Organizers can view detailed engagement reporting at the individual attendee level including live reactions and raised hands across the webinar, as well as a summarized view of overall engagement analytics to drive the right level of follow-ups with attendees.

graphical user interface, application — *Figure 4. Understand how content performed and view detailed engagement metrics for lead follow-up*.

Enable meeting experiences based on your organization’s needs

The latest Teams Premium updates empower administrators to infuse organizational standards into collaborative experiences.

Admins can now improve organization privacy and consistency with the ability to automatically enable background blur for meetings where a user has not selected a background or blur option. When this policy is enabled, the user won’t be able to disable the blur effect and can only select from approved background options, ensuring more private and professional meetings for your teams.

For those high-profile interactions where connection quality is critical, admins can now proactively monitor meeting quality to easily identify and address audio, video, and app-sharing-related issues while the meeting is in progress. This monitoring is based on real-time meeting quality telemetry data available in the Teams Admin Center where admins can define a list of rules to monitor key metrics and receive alerts.

Watch this short video to learn more about proactive monitoring of meeting quality in Teams Premium.

graphical user interface, text, application — *Figure 5. Admins can now proactively monitor meeting quality to easily identify and address audio, video, and app-sharing-related issues while the meeting is in progress.*

Get started with Teams Premium today

It’s great to see the benefits our customers experience with Teams Premium—and we’re just getting started. We will continue to deliver new capabilities to help you address the challenges of the new way of work by improving productivity and reducing costs. Get started for free for 30 days or buy before June 30, 2024, for just USD7 per user per month—30% off the standard USD10 pricing. Try or buy Teams Premium today.