- Outside of AI features, also in Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams Premium largely helps organizers of large or complex events.
- Customers who need secure meetings and custom management should consider the capabilities of Teams Premium.
- Microsoft is also using Teams Premium to enable Teams-adjacent capabilities in other services.
- Most organizations should license some users for Teams Premium, but planning is required to avoid “blanket” purchases.
Teams Premium is an add-on User Subscription License (User SL) that adds capabilities to users with a Teams User SL. Premium will mostly benefit event organizers who manage meetings, webinars, and town halls by providing advanced controls and new security features. Licensing requirements vary by feature, with some requiring licensing only for organizers and others for each individual user, leading, unfortunately, to higher costs for those features. Premium also includes some AI features that overlap with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Most organizations will have several users, from admins to executives, who can benefit from Team Premium, but they should understand how features are licensed to avoid overpurchasing, especially if users are already licensed with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Breaking Down Teams Premium
Teams Premium includes a large number of enhancements and capabilities. The ones mostly likely to influence purchasing decisions can be separated into four categories (see fig.1, below):
AI features that help summarize recorded meetings for the licensed user (also part of Microsoft 365 Copilot.)
Enhanced events that add capabilities to webinars and town halls and mostly require only the event organizer to be licensed.
Enhancements to Places and Teams Phone that include advanced features in Places and a Queues app for call centers, which require licenses for each user.
Security and management features, which can protect content in meetings and aid in managing Teams users, with varying license requirements.
Only Teams Premium AI features are shared with Microsoft 365 Copilot; other capabilities are unique to each product. With the exception of AI features and Microsoft eCDN, there is no other way to license Teams Premium features. In almost all cases, license compliance is built in, preventing users from accessing features they are not licensed for.
Premium AI Features Are Shared with Microsoft 365 Copilot
For many organizations, the AI features of Teams Premium are worth the cost alone, because they can automate notetaking and allow people to catch up on meetings to which they were invited but were unable to attend. However, these features are also included in Microsoft 365 Copilot, allowing organizations to choose one or the other if recap and translations are the only Premium features needed and potentially avoid double-licensing.
Intelligent recap, the most promoted feature of Teams Premium, uses generative AI to create summaries and suggested tasks from meeting recordings and transcriptions. It also provides topic-based markers in meeting recordings, and a timeline of who spoke during the meeting. Recaps are available only for licensed users in the same tenancy as the meeting organizer, whether or not the organizer is licensed. Although the notes can be freely redistributed, other parts of the recap (markers and timelines) cannot.
Live caption translation can generate text captions into any of 40 available languages. If the event organizer has Teams Premium, all attendees can use translations. Plus, even if the organizer is not licensed, any attendee with Premium can use translations for themselves, making the feature beneficial for global organizations with offices or partners in different countries.
Enhanced Events Are Premium’s Mainstay
Teams Premium includes several enhancements for webinars and town halls that make it beneficial primarily for event organizers:
- Teams webinars are organizer-managed interactive online events that include external Web-based registration and e-mail reminders for registered attendees
- Town halls are broadcast (streaming) events intended for hundrerds or even thousands of simultaneous viewers, with interactivity limited primarily to text Q&A.
Teams Premium enhances webinars and town halls with support for larger events, more customization of registration pages and reminder e-mails, engagement reporting, and professional production features for events that have multiple presenters and video sources. These features mostly require only the event organizer to have a Teams Premium license; event attendees and other presenters do not have to be licensed.
Organizations that frequently host customer-facing webinars or town halls should strongly consider Teams Premium for their event organizers, but most users will not need these features for day-to-day meetings.
Premium Event Features for Non-Organizers
Two event features are exceptions to the “event organizer” licensing model:
Org-wide backgrounds allow admins to configure custom meeting backgrounds, organization-defined images that replace the user’s real-life background during video meetings (such as a corporate brand image). Users with Teams Premium have the option (or are forced, depending on configuration) to use these org-defined backgrounds.
Microsoft eCDN enables a content delivery network for town hall broadcasts to reduce the load on corporate networks where large users watch the event within company offices. When using Microsoft Enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN), organizations must purchase eCDN licenses (US$0.50 per user per month) equal to or greater than the number of viewers they expect in a town hall. Each Premium license provides one eCDN license, which can reduce the total number of eCDN licenses needed. For example, a company of 10,000 with 1,000 users licensed for Premium would need only 9,000 eCDN licenses to use eCDN for an “all hands” town hall.
Teams Premium Enables Other Apps
Recently, Microsoft added two “Teams-adjacent” apps, Places and Queues, to the Teams Premium license—either to entice more customers to buy Premium or to monetize capabilities that might not justify a stand-alone User SL.
Places is a scheduling and workplace management solution that helps employees optimize time for in-person collaboration, and find and reserve workspaces and meeting rooms. Although Places core features are included in most Microsoft 365 suites, a Teams Premium license is required by each user for enhanced Places features like workspace browsing and meeting time/place suggestions.
Queues app enhances the call queue capabilities of Teams Phone, easing their use and management in scenarios like a group of salespeople or customer support agents answering a phone pool. The advanced features make it easier for agents to join and leave call queues and provide management and monitoring tools for team leaders. Queues requires each agent and team lead (anyone using the Queues app) to have a Teams Premium license in addition to Teams Phone.
Security and Management Features Deserve Consideration
Several security and user management features are enabled by Teams Premium and can help protect sensitive information in meetings and allow admins to customize Teams user configurations and view org-wide use analytics.
Meeting security enhancements include end-to-end encryption for Teams meetings, the ability to limit who can record, copy, and paste in meetings, sensitivity labels for meetings, and watermarks on content shared in meetings. Only the meeting organizer needs to be licensed to apply these controls to a meeting, although a licensed administrator has to configure meeting templates beforehand (see below).
User management features focus mostly on policy packages and meeting templates. Custom policy packages bundle multiple Teams user policies, like assigned apps and group memberships, into a single package for easy assignment. Custom meeting templates allow admins to preconfigure meeting settings such as included apps, attendee roles, and security options (see above). For example, disabling copy/paste in meeting chat requires a meeting template with that option enabled, which the organizer selects when scheduling the meeting.
Users must be licensed to receive or use custom policy packages and meeting templates, and administrators must be licensed to configure them.
Lastly, a collaboration analytics report gives admins a tenancy-wide view of collaboration with external users, including files shared and meeting invites. Collaboration analytics requires all users in the tenancy to have Premium, but the requirement is not enforced, which can lead to license compliance issues.
Pricing
Teams Premium is an add-on User SL that costs US$10 per user per month, paid annually. Earlier promotional pricing at US$7 per user per month is no longer available. Microsoft 365 Copilot, by comparison, costs US$30 per user per month. Premium has a prerequisite that users have a Teams license, which is included in most Microsoft 365 suites. Use of the Queues app requires a Teams Phone license and a calling plan.
License compliance of most Teams Premium features is enforced by design, although there is no enforcement for Microsoft eCDN licenses or collaboration analytics use.
Directions Recommends
Select your scenarios and license Teams Premium accordingly. Most customers do not need to license all users for Teams Premium, especially if they are already using Microsoft 365 Copilot. However, heavily managed environments may need widescale licensing to leverage custom policy packages to configure Teams for their users.
Get Teams Premium for your event organizers. Customers that frequently hold customer-facing webinars and town halls, or who want access to video production features for their events, should get Teams Premiums; but only the event organizers need to be licensed.
Consider Premium for executives or others who are often double-booked or worse. Intelligent recaps are useful tools to summarize or catch up on recorded meetings. Although a meeting organizer who is licensed for Premium can share out the text recap summary, other recap features like tracking mentions and who spoke in a recording cannot be shared and are only visible to licensed users.
License organizers of meetings who discuss sensitive or confidential matters. Encryption, watermarks, recording limits, and security features may help meet security requirements or regulations. Organizations should license their administrators as well to create the meeting templates that enable these capabilities in meetings.
Resources
Teams and Teams Premium are summarized in the Business Applications Roadmap at “Teams Core Roadmap.”
Places is discussed in the Business Applications Roadmap at “Places Roadmap.”
Queues is covered in the Directions report “Teams Queues Brings Lightweight Call Center Features.”