Microsoft Teams Premium: Minimize Costs While Gaining AI-Powered Productivity

Organizations are looking for strategies to optimize IT expenditures and re-energize staff to achieve business objectives as we confront economic uncertainty and changes in work habits. Organizations want solutions to react to change, boost productivity, and decrease costs now more than ever. Fortunately, current AI-powered solutions have the possibility of increasing individual, team, and corporate productivity while profoundly changing how we work.

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This assurance is quickly becoming a reality. Microsoft is developing new AI-powered features for their business and consumer products, including Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams Premium is now broadly available as part of this ongoing innovation. Built on Microsoft Teams’ familiar, all-in-one collaborative experience, Teams Premium incorporates the most recent technologies, such as Large Language Models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, to make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and secure—whether one-on-one, large meetings, virtual appointments, or webinars. 

Do more with less

With over 400 new features and enhancements added to Microsoft Teams last year, and many more on the way in 2023, all Teams users can expect continued innovation to strengthen relationships and encourage collaboration. However, some customers expect Teams to do more, such as provide more advanced meeting features to boost productivity and assist in the consolidation of their software investments to save money. Many businesses not only pay for meeting solutions, but also for costly add-on items such as webinars, virtual appointments, meeting intelligence, and so on. Customers may obtain these enhanced meeting features and more with Teams Premium for a reasonable monthly fee of USD10 per user. For a limited time, you can access Teams Premium for USD7 per user each month, which is 30% off the regular pricing.

Meet more effectively with Teams Premium

With AI-powered meetings, including GPT from OpenAI, you can concentrate on what counts

With a 252 percent increase in weekly meeting time during the first two years of the epidemic, it was critical to develop strategies to “work smarter, not harder.” The pace of work and the amount of information to sort through have both increased enormously, particularly with meetings. Taking notes, determining critical takeaways, and collecting the appropriate action items and owners are all time-consuming administrative tasks during meetings.

As a a meeting on the meeting recording, allowing you to easily click and listen in on what you missed. When your name was mentioned and a screen was shared, personalized timeline markers would be added.

Soon, these customized meeting highlights will feature speaker timeline markers, which show who talked during the meeting, and when they spoke, and allow you to jump to that point in time. Speaker timeline markers are intelligently sorted by who you work most closely with, ensuring that you never miss input from your manager in a meeting again.

Through intelligent recapping, you may concentrate on the meeting conversation rather than taking notes. In the next few months, you’ll see important themes and insights from the conference, with AI-generated notes written automatically by GPT-3.5. AI-generated tasks and action items are automatically offered for you, making follow-up simple.

AI-generated PowerPoint Live chapters and customized timeline markers for when you leave and rejoin a meeting are now accessible. Additional intelligent recap capabilities will be available in the second quarter of 2023, as previously announced.

AI is also available to assist with some of the most difficult collaboration difficulties, such as dealing with people who speak various languages natively. Anyone in Teams may enable live captions to see real-time subtitles in the spoken language. However, if conference attendees speak multiple languages, corporations frequently spend thousands of dollars on additional real-time meeting translation services. Teams Premium now includes live translations (for captions), which provide AI-powered real-time translations from 40 spoken languages. Meeting attendees may read captions in their own language, saving money while making meetings more efficient and easy. Only the meeting organizer needs Teams Premium in order for all meeting attendees to benefit from live translations.result, Teams incorporates AI across the meeting experience, allowing you to be more productive in new ways. Intelligent recap in Teams subscription provides automatically created meeting notes, recommended actions, and customized highlights to help you acquire the most relevant information even if you miss the meeting.

You may now save time wasted reviewing meeting recordings by using intelligent recap. AI-generated chapters divide the conference into pieces, making it simple to select the topic that is most important to you. For PowerPoint Live meeting recordings, this capability is now accessible. Intelligent recap will also produce meeting chapters automatically based on the meeting transcript.

Furthermore, there may be certain parts of a meeting that you wish to revisit. Personalized timeline markers, which only you can see, call out when you joined or left.

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Personalized: Easily organize meetings that are tailored to your needs and the policies of your business

Many businesses have expressed a desire to tailor their meetings in order to give a best-in-class experience during client conversations or to foster an engaging and inclusive atmosphere within the firm. When interacting with clients in person or simply engaging with a coworker, expressing the business brand and culture is a vital aspect of the encounter. However, with so many interactions and meetings shifting to virtual experiences, these critical features are falling by the wayside. You get that extra degree of professionalism and personalization with Teams Premium. When you join a branded meeting, everyone sees your company’s emblem and colors, and your brand colors may be blended into the conference itself. Teams and Premium customers may enable brand-approved organization backdrops and organization-together mode scenarios throughout the conference, so that what makes your company and your employees distinctive shines through in every aspect of the meeting. These organization backdrops and scenes are already available, and branded meetings will be accessible in mid-February 2023.

Meetings do not come in “one size fits all.” You wouldn’t hold a confidential discussion at a coffee shop or a one-on-one in an auditorium. When you organize an online meeting, you utilize the default settings since exploring meeting choices takes up important time in your day. With Teams Premium, IT admins can now build customized meeting templates—such as a client call, brainstorming meeting, or support desk call—that contain the relevant parameters automatically, minimizing the time and thinking process required to develop and execute the meeting. Leaders may use templates to ensure that their meetings comply with business best practices and rules.

Just as no meeting is “one size fits all,” multiple Teams policies are frequently imposed based on user groups or departments. Your legal department, for example, may have less stringent meeting or communications regulations, such as dealing with external users, than outside agency contractors. Individually assigning meeting, message, and app restrictions may be a difficult undertaking. However, with the newly accessible bespoke user policy packages, IT may save time by developing a customized bundle of policies for individuals in the business who have comparable duties. It’s a time-saving tool that ensures consistency when administering rules for groups of users throughout your business.

Protected: Assist in keeping confidential meetings private

As meetings have become more virtual and hybrid, businesses have faced a new set of information security problems. Teams meetings are increasingly used for sensitive and private corporate communications such as board meetings, financial negotiations, and concealed product evaluations. While organizing a Teams meeting is a quick and easy procedure, it is vital for sensitive meetings to have an extra layer of security to guarantee the content and information remain private.

With enhanced meeting security now available in Teams Premium, you can simply improve protections for secret business meetings without negatively impacting the meeting experience. New meeting features, such as watermarking to prevent leaks and restricting who may record, provide extra safeguards to keep the discussion private. Meeting organizers may reliably show and disclose sensitive material by overlaying a unique watermark over guest screen sharing and video streams. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) can be applied to meetings for those rare, particularly sensitive meetings that require removing some of the fundamental meeting functionality for more enhanced encryption options. As a reminder, data communicated during Teams calls or meetings is always encrypted in transit and at rest using industry-standard encryption.

Meetings frequently change subjects, and this might entail sharing business-sensitive material that requires an extra degree of security. Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels for Teams meetings are now available for Microsoft 365 E5 users with Teams Premium. Meeting organizers can use sensitivity labels to automatically apply the most relevant and significant meeting choices depending on meeting content sensitivity. In the Microsoft Purview compliance portal, compliance admins may create this connection with Teams meetings to specify which meeting choices should be enforced if the label is used in a meeting.

The new features introduced today in Teams Premium make it easier to manage and secure content discussed in meetings.

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Virtual Appointments: Impress clients, simplify appointment administration, and track outcomes

Connecting online with consumers has become a must, whether you’re offering mortgage advice, performing a health visit, or selling to them. Organizations now perceive a continuing potential to interact with and reach customers from any place.

Teams Premium makes it simple to engage with customers and manage the end-to-end customer experience with Virtual Appointments, saving you time and money on extra add-ons or point solutions. Customers would be delighted if you provided a seamless join experience that enabled external guests to join virtual, branded lobby rooms via text message or email on any mobile browser—without the need for them to download an app.

With additional capabilities such as appointment queuing, your scheduling administrators may set up and manage planned and on-demand virtual appointments in one spot. With departmental or organizational-level insights on customer KPIs such as wait times and no-show rates, your organization can also analyze the financial value of virtual appointments and drive customer outcomes.

Virtual Appointments, which are now accessible, make it easier to delight clients, streamline appointment management, and measure results. To learn more, visit the Tech Community blog.

Webinars: Organize events with easy registration and personalized experiences

Many firms desire an all-in-one solution for hosting various sorts of virtual events, whether they are customer-facing webinars to develop companies or online organization-wide training, that provides personalized touches for both presenters and participants. Teams Premium features webinars, allowing you to effortlessly arrange these events while saving you time and money—no need for add-on solutions or working across platforms. Webinars allow presenters to connect to a virtual green room to prepare for the webinar. Presenters have the opportunity and space to meet with guests and do a fast briefing or test run without interrupting them. Guests can communicate with the presenters and one another via chat and Q&A while waiting for the event to begin.

Furthermore, presenters may more efficiently govern what participants view throughout the webinar. These host controls result in more professionally produced events and make it easier to engage speakers and attendees in more dynamic ways. In addition to this customization, the registration experience will be enhanced with registration waitlists and manual approval, as well as the opportunity to adjust registration start and finish periods for improved event management.

Integrate multiple external media sources into your webinar using RTMP-in to improve your presentation and offer more dynamic material. You’ll be able to live stream a bespoke RTMP source, such as a professionally produced movie or high-quality screen sharing, to all guests in the event by utilizing an external encoder and activating RTMP-in.

You may use automatic reminder emails to generate enthusiasm and boost attendance for your webinars. These emails will be sent to all confirmed registrants at the time you choose ahead of time and will include a custom-branded header, webinar details, and a link to attend the event.

With the exception of automatic email reminders, which will be accessible in March 2023, these webinar options are already available. 

Microsoft eCDN: Enhance live event experiences

Microsoft Enterprise Content Deliver Network (eCDN) is now available in Teams Premium to improve live event experiences across an enterprise. Organizations may use Microsoft eCDN to effortlessly and securely live stream global meetings, all-hands meetings, and town halls, as well as distribute company-wide trainings via Teams Live Events. Microsoft eCDN reduces the strain on the corporate network, prevents connectivity failures and poor video quality, and requires no extra installation on user endpoints or devices.

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[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]