Microsoft announces release date for Teams Premium offering

Teams Premium, a new tier of Microsoft Teams first announced at the company’s Ignite event in October, is set to be generally available from February this year.

Operating in public preview since December, the Premium version of the collaboration application offers users advanced security features, such as the ability to watermark meetings, turn on end-to-end encryption for meetings with more than 50 participants, and add sensitivity labels for virtual meetings that will prevent participants from copying and pasting meeting chats.

Additionally, with Teams Premium, users will be able to turn on live translation for captions from 40 languages, while customers hosting webinars will have access to advanced capabilities such as registration waitlist and manual approval, separate virtual greenrooms for presenters and attendees before an event begins, and the option to better manage what attendees see — allowing them to only see shared content and participants you bring on-screen, for example.

This new version of Teams will also use artificial intelligence to trigger recaps, to-do lists and suggest action items so that follow-ups are not missed.  

Teams Premium requires an add-on license over and above a Microsoft 365 subscription and is expected to be priced at $10 per user per month, although Microsoft has said it will not reveal the final price until the tool is made generally available.

Writing in a blog post when Teams Premium was first announced, Nicole Herskowitz, vice president of Microsoft Teams, said that Microsoft’s new offering will help make every meeting more personalized, intelligent, and secure.

“Virtual and hybrid meetings continue to take up the lion’s share of time spent at work,” she wrote. “Now, more than ever, leaders need an integrated solution that combines all the advanced meeting capabilities, takes meeting culture to the next level, and allows them to do more with less.”