Microsoft Teams Premium Rollout: Why Should the Government Community Care?

As the world of work progresses further into a digital landscape, virtual and hybrid meetings continue to become standard practice for organizations globally – including government bodies. To help users get the best out of meeting experiences without draining out IT budgets trying to use multiple meeting solutions, Microsoft finally introduced Teams Premium. 

In this month’s Microsoft 365 Government Community Call episode, Jay and the #M365GovCC crew invited Margi Desai, license product manager for Teams Engineering, to talk about Teams Premium and why it’s relevant for the government community today. 

Watch the video below or read on as we review their discussion’s key points. 

What is Teams Premium? 

Teams Premium is an add-on to Microsoft Teams offering more intelligent, personalized, and protected meetings. On top of current Teams features, users with a Teams Premium license can take advantage of AI-powered features and other advanced meeting capabilities that introduce more efficiency, enhanced controls, and better security.  

Teams Premium is part of Microsoft’s efforts to help organizations do more with less – saving money and streamlining their SaaS investments better. 

Teams Premium Capability: Intelligence Recap 

Intelligence recap is a Teams Premium functionality that heavily infuses AI-powered capabilities in the whole meeting experience to help people be more productive in new ways. Below are some of its significant features: 

• AI-generated chapters: meetings are divided into sections so users can easily pick and choose the content most relevant to them. 
• Personalized timeline markers: tells the user when they joined and left a meeting, when a user’s name was mentioned, and when a screen was shared – allowing users to rewatch what they have missed and get up to date with any follow-up tasks or action items that may have been discussed in the meeting.  
• Speaker timeline markers: recaps who spoke during the meeting and the timeline of when they spoke so others can quickly jump in and listen to what other users have talked about. 

Teams Premium Capability: AI-Driven Translations 

One common collaboration challenge that many organizations still face today is the language barrier. For meetings with users who speak different native languages, you can bridge language barriers with Teams Premium live translations for captions, where users can see real-time captions either in the spoken language or automatically translated.  

While organizations used to spend thousands of dollars for additional real-time meeting translation services, Teams Premium now offers live caption translation for over 40 different languages.  

This capability has extended coverage, so even if only the meeting organizer has a Teams Premium license, every meeting participant can benefit from the live caption and translation feature once the organizer turns it on. 

Teams Premium Personalized Features 

Users can also make meetings and virtual events more personalized and consistently managed with new host and event management controls, such as Advanced Webinars and virtual appointments.  

Meeting themes, templates, and custom policy packages are also available so organizers can improve branding when meeting with external clients. Down the road, users can expect different branding for subsidiaries within an organization for internal-facing meetings. 

Teams Premium Advanced Protection Features 

The shift to hybrid and virtual meetings opened new information protection challenges for highly regulated industries and government organizations.  

Today, sensitive and confidential meetings, board meetings, and financial discussions go through Teams meetings. That’s why one Teams Premium feature that remains near and dear to government customers is advanced protection.  

With Teams Premium, organizations can have advanced protection measures without hampering their meeting experience. Enjoy increased safeguards like unique watermarking over attendee screen share and video feeds and controlling who can record so you can keep private discussions confidential. You can also enable end-to-end encryption for highly confidential meetings as an additional layer of protection. 

Teams Premium Licensing: What You Need to Know 

Teams Premium is a per-user per-month offering, so if you want all users to enjoy the advanced meeting functionalities of Teams Premium, all your users would need a premium license.  

There are, however, features with extended coverage, especially advanced protection capabilities. For instance, if only the meeting organizer has a premium license, all meeting participants can still take advantage of live translations for captions, watermark, and end-to-end encryption, ensuring a consistent experience for all users during the meeting.   

Some features, like intelligent recap, will not be available for other users without a premium license. So, after the meeting, a user with a premium license will have a recording with features like personalized timeline markers and AI notes. In contrast, non-licensed users will only see the generic recording of the meeting. 

Teams Premium in GCC: How to Get Started 

Teams Premium has been available since March 1. While some AI features are still rolling out, even in commercial, most protected and personalized features are already available in GCC (Government Community Cloud). By July and August, all features should be available.   

To get started, you can purchase your Teams Premium licenses or start a 30-day trial (new announcement: free trial is extended to 60 days!) to test the features. Talk to your Microsoft Enterprise agreement handler so you can start planning how to deploy Teams Premium to your organization. 

Want quick time to value with the ability to take advantage of all that Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Teams have to offer? Check out AvePoint Public Sector solutions.

Adopt Teams Premium and Embrace Productivity

Previously, many barriers have made collaboration and communication in the cloud challenging, especially for highly regulated industries, the government included. But today, Teams Premium has made more potential available for digital transformation in the government sector – something that wasn’t possible before because of the hybrid setup.  

That’s why many government customers and financial services institutions are thrilled with what Teams Premium can offer.   

And according to Margi, this is only the beginning – more exciting things are yet to come. Don’t miss out on all the future Microsoft updates; subscribe to the Microsoft 365 Government Community Call today and get the latest news for GCC!