#Is Teams Premium Worth It?

I’ve had many conversations with customers around this exact topic. Teams Premium can be an awkward conversation to approach sometimes with customers that already spend so much on Microsoft licensing, I’ve had customers say things like “Oh no, there’s not another license is there?” or “No, we have E5 which includes EVERYTHING”.

So, I’m going explain some of the key features included in the Microsoft Teams Premium license and you can make the decision if you think it’s worth the uplift for the added features.

First things first, trails, like most Microsoft licensing you are able to get a trail for Microsoft Teams Premium and this can happen a couple of different ways. Admins can purchase and assign a Zero-cost 30-day trail license for up to 25 users. As well as this there is also a self-service option for this trail which will allow users to try the Teams Premium features for 60-days by authenticating with their AAD account and no payment details required.

After both trails have hit their time limit there is no grace period these features will no longer be available for these users.

*note* These self-service trails can be blocked by your admins but can be a good indicator of if your user base is interested in these features.

Here are some of the feature enhancements Teams Premium brings to your experience which I wanted to highlight, for a full list of features visit the Learn Page:

Meetings -

  • Customise meeting templates for your organisation
  • Add organisation branding to meeting lobbies
  • Customise meeting backgrounds for your organisation
  • Add branding to meeting invites and meeting join launch pages
  • Read live translated captions during meetings
  • Use RTMP-In for meetings
  • View engagement reports
  • Audio Quality alerts
  • Video Quality alerts
  • Screen sharing quality alerts
  • Prevent users from sharing content when attending external Teams meetings

Queues App

  • Call Queue and Auto Attendant management directly in Teams client
  • Real-time metrics for Call Queues and Auto Attendants
  • Historical reporting for Call Queues and Auto Attendants

Webinars

  • Manage what attendees see
  • Send custom and reminder emails to registrants
  • Create a webinar waitlist
  • Webinar organisers can view engagement reports
  • Use RTMP-In for webinars

Town Halls

  • Broadcast town halls to 20k attendees
  • Town hall Q&A capacity for 20k attendees
  • Host up to 50 town halls simultaneously
  • Use Microsoft eCDN for Premium town halls
  • View Microsoft Town hall insights
  • Edit town hall emails
  • Town hall attendee reactions
  • Town hall attendee reactions
  • Organizers can pre-select 10 languages for live translated captions
  • Real time monitoring for the attendee experience
  • Event chat for attendees

Collaboration Tools

Some of these features will require every user in the tenant to have the Teams Premium license assigned for use of Advanced collaboration analytics.

  • Admin can view insights on inactive external domains
  • Admin can view insights on inactive Teams
  • Admin can view insights on external collaboration by users
  • Admin can view insights on external collaboration by Team
  • Admin can view insights on external collaboration by guest
  • Users can block incoming chats from people in your organisation

Intelligent Recap

These features are also available via the Copilot for M365 license.

  • View when you were mentioned in a meeting from the transcript
  • View when a screen was shared in a meeting transcript
  • View time markers in meeting recording when you joined or left a meeting
  • Jump to different speakers with speaker timeline markers
  • View AI-generated notes and tasks from meetings

Meet App

  • View and recap meetings that you missed
  • View and recap meetings that mention you
  • View when you were mentioned in a meeting
  • View AI-generated tasks from meetings

Places

  • Individual desk booking
  • Intelligent suggestions
  • Quick Book
  • Room check-in and auto release
  • Space analytics

That is an overview of some of the features I think are useful might convince you to make the plunge and assign the Teams Premium license to all or even a subset of your users. There is a side of the fence that doesn’t like the premium licensing SKU, especially when features have moved from the base license into the premium although these are not extensive.

Do you think this increased feature set is enough to justify the cost of the Premium License?

Are you using Teams Premium right now? Let me know in the comments.