Vasyl Grygoriev

Lizard Soft General Manager

During the annual Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft Corporation announced the release of Microsoft Teams Premium, a new offering developed on the basis of the already familiar features of Teams.

From now on collaboration, one-on-ones, large meetings, and webinars will become safer, smarter, and more personalized. New capabilities, Microsoft notes, will be presented in December 2022 as part of the Teams Premium preview. The general version will appear in February 2023. In the first half of 2023, the smart resume feature will be available.

Personalization: advanced settings for meetings

Now in Microsoft Teams Premium, meeting guides are available. These are settings that the User can apply depending on the type of online meeting. It can be a conversation with a customer, a brainstorming meeting, or a help desk call. Having configured the necessary parameters in advance, you would simply select the type of your meeting from the menu, and the parameters will be applied automatically. This, Microsoft is convinced, will significantly save the User's time to prepare for online events.

Teams Premium Interface: meeting guides

AI at meetings you can't join

When you don't have the time or opportunity to join a meeting, you can still keep up with all the discussions, but without wasting words, using the intelligent recap function. The artificial intelligence used in Microsoft Teams Premium will record the most important points of the online meeting for you, divide them into sections, and enhance such important moments as mentioning your name during the meeting or sharing the screen. So that finding important information for you from this meeting will be much faster and more effective.

In addition, dynamic subtitles during online communication, transcription with speaker recognition, and even real-time translations from 40 spoken languages will be available to Users. So, every User will be able to read subtitles in their native language during meetings with foreign-speaking colleagues.

Also, it will now be even easier to join the meeting just from the browser and without downloading any applications.

Teams Premium Interface: intelligent recap

Security: advanced protections

If during an online meeting information that should not be disclosed (such as trade secrets, corporate data, etc.) is supposed to be shared, the ability to record in Teams Premium can be limited. You can also apply watermarks.

Advanced features for webinars

Among the fresh offerings of Teams Premium are new sign-up features, including a waiting list and manual approval. If the waitlist function is enabled, registration for webinars will remain open even if the participant limit set up by the organizer is exceeded. In this way, newly registered participants will be automatically added to the waiting list. As soon as a new place becomes available, participants will automatically be added to the waiting list. Therefore, the organizers of the event will be able to review the applications with the information about the candidates for participation and approve or reject them on their own.

Registration start and end times can also be set up in advance. It is also possible to set up the sending of e-mails with a reminder about the event.

There is a virtual waiting room (virtual green room) for the organizers and speakers to be in touch and, if necessary, to communicate before the speech or to complete the needed preparations. This is a special virtual space «behind the scenes»where there are no participants. So that before the start of the event, it will be possible to monitor chats and manage participants' parameters from there. At the same time, the participants, while waiting for the start, will be able to chat, and communicate with each other and the speakers.

Teams Premium Interface: virtual green room

In order not to distract the webinar participants from the main thing, Teams Premium has special controls. With ones it will be possible to turn off the video or delete the photo of the profiles of individual participants. You can ask questions during the event by using the function of raising your hand.

Teams App currently has over 270 million monthly active users. Last year alone, the vendor added about 450 new functions. All of them were created to facilitate and speed up cooperation between users. In this way, the Teams platform has provided the most opportunities to optimize work than any other program.

According to Microsoft.com