Microsoft has launched its Teams premium add-on license at $7 per user per month, but don’t get too excited, the user still needs a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 license as a pre-requisite for Teams premium to work.
So why will anyone buy this add-on? let's find out the features and then discuss its need.
Microsoft is advertising the add-on license as a way to "work smarter and not harder" by reducing the time consumed during the meeting in taking notes and capturing the action items and their owners.
What does Teams premium bring in $7?
The following features are made generally available for organizations to use with Teams premium add-on:
Intelligent Recap: This feature will provide a recap of meeting highlights in the form of meeting notes and recommended tasks even if a user misses a meeting. No longer a user needs to go through the meeting recording to get the summary of the meeting.
AI-generated chapters: Though only available in PowerPoint live meetings recordings for now, this feature breaks down the meeting into different sub-sections, allowing users to only revisit the relevant sections saving time. Intelligent recap will also create meeting chapters using meeting transcripts as well.
Personalized timeline markers: It makes sense for a user to identify if his/her name was called without going through the complete meeting recording or what was discussed once he left the meeting. Personalized timeline markers provide this feature for quick identification of when a user left the meeting or his/her name was called.
Live translations: No more language barriers while meeting with your colleagues or guests from other parts of the world. Meeting participants can read the captions in their chosen language out of 40 using AI-powered real-time translations.
Organization backgrounds: This feature provides Teams premium users an option to customize teams meetings with their organization's backgrounds. To be honest, it's just a good-to-have feature for me. Customization of backgrounds is always available without Teams premium add-on too.
Meeting templates: This is another good to have feature to customize meeting templates based on the type of participants that are going to join the meeting. In large organizations, users do not make a lot of customizations in meeting options settings however this feature might see good user adoption once benefits are being highlighted through various adoption programs.
Advanced meeting protection: This is a nice add-on where users while creating a meeting can select the type of protection they want in their meetings. It provides end-to-end meeting encryption and watermarking on video and content shared in the meeting for any unwanted use of data.
For Microsoft 365 E5 customers with Teams premium can now enable Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels for Teams meetings
Virtual appointments: Few features of virtual appointments were already available in Microsoft 365/Office 365 plans. Through Teams premium, Microsoft has added extra features like SMS text reminders and custom waiting rooms.
In the Virtual appointment app, features like a queue view of scheduled & on-demand appointments and analytics & reports are added through Teams premium.
Features that will be made available later in 2023:
Speaker timeline markers: This feature will show the user who spoke during the meeting and when they spoke so the users can directly view that specific portion of the recording.
AI-generated notes powered by GPT: To be rolled out in Q2 of 2023, this feature will provide AI-generated notes and AI-generated tasks & action items suggested for the users, all powered through GPT 3.5
Branded Meetings: To be rolled out in mid-Feb,2023 this feature will allow users to customize the meeting joining page using their own logos and colors.
My take on Teams premium add-on:
Though there are a few features that are really helpful in saving time and increasing productivity like AI-powered meeting notes and action items; a $7 per user per month add-on will be used only by limited users in the organization, unlike Teams which is used by all users and comes as a free service with other licenses.
Microsoft has marketed this add-on as being powered by the famous ChatGPT platform however it looks like only the subset of ChatGPT features will be used.
Users might still stick to other software like Asana, Jira, Trello, etc for their day-to-day work unless there is tight integration of data flowing between Teams premium and these softwares allowing users to use Teams as a single workplace platform for all tasks.
IMHO, Microsoft will bundle this add-on with E3/E5 plans in future by increasing price of these existing licensing plans.
Few scenarios where Team premium will be used:
Teams users providing services through the virtual appointment app
Product Managers/Project Managers regular sync-ups or sprints discussions
Sales or marketing hurdle meetings
Meetings with sensitive information being shared with external participants etc.
Of course, there will be more scenarios, but the adoption of this add-on license will not be on an organization-wide level plus there will be third-party solutions that are or will provide some of these features at a lower cost.
I will try to use Teams premium in a few days.
Keep reading to see actual updates from my tests and what's in store for webinars through Teams premium.
I would like to hear your views on this add-on license. Please post your comments on this blog or on the forum here
Thank You!
References:
Kommentare