Microsoft Teams Premium vs. Copilot in Teams

In the era of hybrid work environments, Microsoft Teams has evolved into a cornerstone of Microsoft’s product portfolio. It comes as no surprise that Microsoft is committed to enhancing this platform continuously, equipping users with innovative features to streamline their experience on a platform they rely on extensively. Among the most recent and impactful additions to Teams are Copilot in Teams and Teams Premium. In this blog, we will dive into the key features of these solutions and explore how they differ and work together to bring added value to you as a user. 

Microsoft Teams Premium 

Microsoft Teams Premium, introduced as an add-on license for Microsoft Teams, enhances users’ access to more advanced experiences within the Teams ecosystem. Teams Premium leverages the power of AI to facilitate smarter and more efficient work processes, creating personalized meeting experiences that drive improved business outcomes, all while enabling users to collaborate with greater security. 

Primary features of Microsoft Teams 

Intelligence recap with Microsoft Teams Premium 

At the forefront of Teams Premium is the “Intelligence Recap,” a powerful tool designed to transform the way businesses approach meetings and information retention. With the “Intelligence Recap” feature in Teams Premium, you can harness the full potential of AI to work smarter and more efficiently. 

 

1. AI-powered meeting summaries: Say goodbye to the days of frantically taking notes during meetings. With “Intelligence Recap,” AI-generated notes using GPT technology from OpenAI provide a comprehensive summary of every meeting. This invaluable feature ensures you can concentrate on the meeting’s discussion itself without worrying about capturing every detail.

2. AI-generated action items: Keeping up with action items and tasks resulting from meetings can be a daunting task. Teams Premium simplifies this process by offering AI-generated tasks and action items. This means that you can quickly follow up with meeting attendees and ensure that critical tasks are addressed promptly.

3. Personalized meeting timeline: “Intelligence Recap” offers a personalized timeline that allows you to navigate through meeting recordings. You can easily locate instances when your name was mentioned, when you joined or left the meeting, and when others spoke. This feature saves time and makes it easier to find and reference specific parts of the meeting.

4. Live meeting caption translation: In today’s globalized world, collaboration often spans multiple languages and geographies. Microsoft Teams Premium takes this into account by offering live translation of meeting captions. This ensures that language barriers don’t hinder effective teamwork, promoting clarity and understanding between team members from various parts of the world.

Custom and personalized meetings with Teams Premium 

Microsoft Teams Premium also offers an array of features to help you create a personalized and professional experience for your audience.

1. Enjoy personalized meetings: With Microsoft Teams Premium, you can go beyond the ordinary and create personalized meetings that embody your organization’s identity, making a lasting impression on all participants. With predefined meeting templates, you can personalize your meeting environment with meeting themes, elevating the visual appearance of your meetings to create a unique and branded experience for all participants. This not only enhances engagement but also adds a professional touch to your meetings, making them stand out.

2. Let your brand shine: Your brand is a crucial element of your identity, and Microsoft Teams Premium provides the means to let it shine during virtual meetings. You can infuse your brand into meetings by incorporating organizational backgrounds and “organization together mode” scenes. This not only enhances your company’s presence but also fosters a more engaging and professional atmosphere for your audience.

 

Organizational backgrounds allow you to create and use your own custom images as backgrounds, setting the stage and creating the perfect backdrop for your virtual gatherings. Additionally, with custom together mode scenes for organizations, you can leverage AI segmentation technology to create, customize, or accept custom together mode scenes for your meetings. This ensures that all participants share the same background, creating a sense of unity and shared space. 

Elevating security with Microsoft Teams Premium 

Ensuring the security of your virtual meetings and confidential information is essential. Microsoft Teams Premium offers a comprehensive suite of security features designed to safeguard your meetings and protect sensitive data.

1. Advanced meeting protection: With Microsoft Teams Premium, you can fortify your organization’s security by applying advanced meeting protection measures. This includes bolstering encryption, automating safety options, and implementing strategies to thwart data leaks.

Furthermore, Microsoft Teams Premium strengthens security by enabling secure meeting recordings and passcodes. Recordings are securely stored, allowing for later review and ensuring the integrity of meetings. Meeting passcodes add an extra layer of security, ensuring that only authorized participants can join, enhancing control and privacy.

2. Watermarking for enhanced security: Protecting sensitive information is a top priority, and Teams Premium offers a unique solution by enabling watermarking of shared content and video feeds. Watermarking acts as a deterrent against leaks and ensures that sensitive data remains securely within the Teams environment. Each document or file shared in Teams is imprinted with a unique identifier, preventing unauthorized sharing or leaking of confidential information.

3. Enhancing confidentiality with meeting options: Microsoft Teams Premium empowers organizations to bolster confidentiality. You can designate who has access to record meetings, and for online meetings requiring the highest level of protection, end-to-end encryption is available. This encryption provides an additional layer of security, ensuring sensitive data remains secure and preventing unauthorized access or data breaches.

4. Automation with sensitivity labels: For customers with a Microsoft 365 E5 subscription, Teams Premium provides the capability to apply sensitivity labels. These labels automate the addition of meeting options that protect sensitive information. The ability to classify and protect data based on its sensitivity level ensures that consistent protection policies are applied across Microsoft 365, encompassing Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

5. Data loss prevention (DLP): Teams Premium includes DLP policies designed to protect sensitive information and prevent data leaks. These policies allow administrators to create rules that identify and safeguard sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or social security numbers, from being inadvertently shared or leaked within Teams.

6. eDiscovery and legal hold: Teams Premium incorporates eDiscovery and legal hold capabilities that help organizations meet their legal and regulatory requirements. These features enable administrators to search and identify relevant data within Teams and place legal holds on specific content, ensuring it is preserved for legal or regulatory purposes.

7. Advanced threat protection: Safeguarding against malicious attacks and malware is critical, and Teams Premium includes advanced threat protection features. These encompass anti-phishing protection, safe links, and safe attachments, collectively reducing the risk of users clicking on malicious links or opening infected attachments within Teams.

Advanced virtual appointments 

Microsoft Teams Premium takes a significant leap forward by offering a comprehensive suite of features to optimize and streamline your virtual appointments. 

1. SMS notifications: Microsoft Teams Premium introduces SMS notifications, a powerful tool that empowers event organizers to send personalized text messages to attendees, reminding them of their upcoming appointments. This feature not only improves attendance rates but also provides attendees with convenient and tailored reminders, ensuring they stay informed and engaged.

2. Custom waiting room: The custom waiting room feature allows event organizers to tailor the waiting room experience for attendees. With this capability, event organizers can create a more personalized, professional, and branded waiting room environment, leaving a positive impression on their attendees.

3. Queue management for scheduled and on-demand appointments: Event organizers can efficiently manage their appointments with the queue management feature. It enables organizers to prioritize their workload, ensuring that the most critical appointments receive the attention they deserve. You can access a centralized queue that showcases both scheduled and on-demand appointments, with added pre-appointment chat capabilities.

 

4. Analytics for informed decision-making: With Microsoft Teams Premium, event organizers gain valuable insights into their appointments, ensuring a superior experience for both organizers and attendees. By leveraging detailed reports and analytics, you can view aggregated appointment data and trends, including no-shows and wait times. These insights empower better decision-making, fostering enhanced customer experiences and improved outcomes.

Elevating webinars with Microsoft Teams Premium 

Webinars have become a cornerstone of modern communication, allowing organizations to engage with diverse audiences and share their message effectively. Microsoft Teams Premium brings a host of features that significantly impact the way webinars are conducted, enhancing both the presenter and attendee experience.  

1. Streamlined registration workflows: Managing demand and registration capacity is a breeze with Teams Premium. You can enable waitlists and manually approve registrants, providing you with the flexibility to control your webinar’s attendance and ensuring a smooth registration process.

2. Behind-the-scenes tools: Join a virtual green room – a dedicated space for presenters – that allows you to stage content, interact with other presenters, prepare, and respond to chats and Q&A with attendees. This “backstage” area ensures that your presentation runs smoothly, and you can collaborate seamlessly with your co-presenters.

3. Audience engagement management: To keep your attendees interested and focused, Teams Premium lets you curate and manage what they see on their screens during webinars. Minimizing distractions ensures that your audience remains engaged with your content and message.

To learn more about Microsoft Teams Premium, please refer to Microsoft Teams Premium licensing. 

Copilot in Microsoft Teams 

While it shares some commonalities with Teams Premium, Copilot takes collaboration to the next level with an array of features designed to streamline your workflow and empower productivity. 

Meeting recap 

Much like Teams Premium, Copilot excels at providing meeting recaps and key action items that are pertinent to you. However, Copilot goes a step further by not just summarizing meetings but also proactively suggesting actions based on the discussions that have taken place. Copilot delves into contextual details to uncover the why and how behind decisions made during meetings, even revealing the underlying rationale. The best part? Even if you’ve missed a meeting, Copilot has you covered by making these features accessible. 

During sales calls, Copilot truly shines. As clients engage in conversations, Copilot takes charge of summarizing the call and captures their questions related to product features, benefits, pricing, and sales advice. Within Teams chat, Copilot enables you to retrieve previously discussed information from prior sales calls, keeping you up-to-date and well-prepared. 

 

Conversation summaries 

Copilot isn’t just limited to meetings; it extends to Teams chat as well. Users can effortlessly extract key conversation points from chat threads, making it exceptionally valuable for teams operating across different time zones. Rather than sifting through an entire chat history, Copilot delivers quick and concise conversation summaries, allowing you to stay current and informed. Furthermore, Copilot can extract essential information from conversations to create structured lists or tables. 

 

The Microsoft 365 Copilot chat experience 

Copilot in Microsoft Teams and in the browser is a transformative experience that collaborates with you. Leveraging the power of Microsoft Graph, Copilot integrates data from various sources, such as documents, presentations, email, files, meetings, chats, and third-party applications. This integration holds the potential to significantly reduce the time and effort required during your workday. 

Instead of the tedious task of searching through numerous emails, chats, meeting notes, and documents in preparation for a meeting, you can simply ask Copilot. Copilot intelligently finds and summarizes everything relevant to the project, eliminating the need for extensive manual research. It can also keep you updated on the latest developments related to a specific topic, provide insights into outstanding project deliverables and potential risks, and much more. 

Pricing 

Microsoft Teams Premium is priced at an affordable $7 per user per month. This cost-effective solution provides access to a range of new functionalities within Teams and can be seamlessly integrated into several Microsoft 365 plans, including Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Microsoft 365 E3, and Microsoft 365 E5 subscriptions. 

Microsoft 365 Copilot, on the other hand, is available for $30 per user per month and is designed to meet the specific needs of Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers. This pricing structure makes it accessible to organizations seeking advanced collaboration and productivity features, ensuring that Copilot enhances their work experience effectively. 

A quick recap 

In the rapidly evolving landscape of hybrid work, Microsoft Teams Premium and Copilot work together to elevate your collaborative and productivity experiences. Together, they form a dynamic duo that enhances your meetings, communication, and content management. While Teams Premium streamlines meetings and ensures robust security, Copilot takes collaboration to the next level by providing insightful meeting recaps and actionable suggestions. This combination of features makes meetings more efficient, keeps communication organized, and ensures that your content and information are secure. If you’re interested in implementing these solutions within the flow of work, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.