- A new add-on is coming to Microsoft’s video conferencing platform in the guise of Teams Premium.
- The company is offering interested customers a 30-day free preview of the service ahead of its February 2023 launch.
- Teams Premium will bring new branding options, as well as heightened security and AI functionalities.
A free 30-day preview of a “premium” Microsoft Teams add-on has launched and brings more personalisation, AI functionality, and more security options to the base version of Microsoft’s video conferencing platform.
Called Microsoft Teams Premium, the add-on was promised for a December preview by the tech giant at its annual Ignite event for 2022.
“Today, we are excited to share that we are making Microsoft Teams Premium broadly available for preview as a limited trial for our commercial customers through the Microsoft 365 admin center,” writes Microsoft in an official blog post about the add-on’s launch on Friday.
The company says that Teams Premium makes every meeting, from one-on-one chats, to large business-wide meetings, to hundred-people webinars, “more personalised, intelligent and secure.”
With Teams Premium, Microsoft says you can:
- “Extend your organization’s brand and company culture across meetings with new custom branding options, organization backgrounds, and organization-together mode scenes,
- Make use of new AI functionalities like live translations through captioning to remove language barriers, and intelligent recap features offering smarting recording with ‘autogenerated chapters, AI-suggested action items, and insights,’
- Apply ‘advanced meeting protection’ such as Watermark, End-to-end encryption for meetings, and Sensitivity labels for meetings to prevent copy/paste of meeting chat to better protect your virtual meetings,
- Advanced capabilities to streamline event workflows with registration waitlist and manual approval for webinars and the ability to add up to one thousand attendees,
- You can facilitate behind-the-scene actions through a virtual green room for webinar 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,
- Make use of 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.”
The free 30-day preview does not include all of the features teased during the Ignite event held in October, and users will lose access to the preview once the 30-day period expires.
Microsoft is aiming for early February 2023 for the general availability of Teams Premium, which is expected to cost around $10 a month, according to The Verge.
Those interested in signing up for the free preview can do so at the Microsoft 365 admin centre.
