Microsoft Teams Premium - Overview for admins

The features described in this article require Teams Premium. Teams Premium licenses aren't a replacement for Teams licenses. Users must have both a Teams license and a Teams Premium license for Teams and Teams Premium features to work properly. For more information about feature availability and licensing, see Teams Premium licensing.

Teams Premium is an add-on license that provides the following enhancements to Teams:

• Enhanced meeting experiences for your end users
• Enhanced security and protection for meetings
• Enhanced administrative and telemetry support

This article, written for IT Pros and admins who are deploying and configuring Teams Premium, describes the available features and provides links to more detailed documentation.

The following sections in this article describe the Teams Premium enhancements for:

• Protection and advanced management for meetings
• Personalized meetings
• Premium events
• Virtual Appointments
• Intelligent meeting features

For more general information about Teams meetings and premium events, see the following articles:

• Meetings, webinars, and town halls
• Plan for Teams meetings
• Plan for Teams webinars
• Plan for Teams town halls

Protection and advanced management for meetings

Teams Premium provides more ways to safeguard and monitor users' Teams experiences with the following key features:

• Advanced collaboration analytics - View external collaboration activity data on your users, teams, federated domains, channels, and guests.

• Audio quality alerts - Set up alerts for in-progress meeting audio issues and get notified immediately when your specified users experience issues.

• Custom user policy packages - Create policy packages to simplify, streamline, and help provide consistency when managing policies for groups of users across your organization.

• End-to-end encryption - Enforced through a sensitivity label, end-to-end encryption provides increased security for meetings that require a higher level of protection.

• Hide attendee names - Meeting and webinar organizers can hide the names of attendees from other attendees in the stage, roster, and chat.

• Manage what attendees see - Meeting organizers can decide whose avatars or video feeds to spotlight during a Teams meeting while others are hidden from view.

• Prevent users from sharing content in external Teams meetings - Control whether users in your org with a Teams Premium license can share content when attending external Teams meetings.

• Screen sharing quality alerts - Set up alerts for in-progress meeting screen sharing issues and get notified immediately when your specified users experience issues.

• Sensitivity labels - Extended capabilities for sensitivity labels to control meeting settings normally controlled by the meeting organizer. These capabilities include new settings to control lobby, chat, chat copy, presentation, and recording functions.

• Real time telemetry and retention - Real-time telemetry is gathered automatically for all users who have a Teams Premium license and retained for seven days.

• Video quality alerts - Set up alerts for in-progress meeting video issues and get notified immediately when your specified users experience issues.

• Watermarking - Enforced through a sensitivity label, watermarks display the email address of a meeting participant. Watermarks are useful for protecting confidential information shared in meetings.

Personalized meetings

Teams Premium provides more ways to personalize your Teams meeting experiences with the following key features:

• Custom meeting backgrounds for organizations - Create and define custom meeting backgrounds that your users can use during meetings and events.

• Custom together mode scenes for organizations -Customize, create, or accept together mode scenes to digitally combine participants into a single virtual scene.

• Meeting templates - Control meeting settings that the meeting organizer normally controls. With templates, you can create consistent meeting experiences in your organization and help enforce compliance requirements and business rules.

• Meeting themes - Set up and create meeting themes for various business units and departments within a single tenant.

• Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP)-In - Organizers can produce their Teams meetings directly from an external hardware or software-based encoder.

Premium events

Teams Premium offers advanced features to enhance your town halls and webinars.

• Town halls bring interactive video streaming to a new level. Town halls are meant for one-to-many communications where the presenters, organizers, and co-organizers are leading the interactions. The audience participation is primarily to view and react to the content being shared.

• Webinars provide a two-way interactive virtual event where the presenters deliver information to attendees. This format provides extra control for an organizer over the conversation and participants.

The following sections describe Teams Premium feature enhancements for town halls and webinars. For more information about planning for town halls, webinars, and meetings in general, see Plan for town halls, Plan for webinars, and Meetings, webinars, and town halls.

Town halls

Teams Premium provides more ways to elevate Teams town halls in your org with the following key features:

• Custom emails - Organizers and co-organizers can customize the town hall email templates sent to attendees.
• Increased broadcast and Q&A capacity- Organizers can broadcast their town halls to 20,000 attendees. All attendees can use Q&A to interact with presenters, organizers, and co-organizers.
• Live translated captions- The organizer can choose up to 10 languages for attendees to use when translating captions during the town hall.
• Microsoft eCDN - Optimize network performance for video streaming within an enterprise network. Microsoft eCDN allows millions of enterprise users around the world to communicate face-to-face efficiently and reliably. You can use the Microsoft eCDN or select one of our partner providers for Premium town halls.
• Real time monitoring of the attendee experience - Admins can use the eCDN analytics dashboard to troubleshoot the attendee experience during live town halls.
• Town hall insights - Town hall organizers can troubleshoot town halls while they're live.

Webinars

Teams Premium provides more ways to elevate Teams webinars in your org with the following key features:

• Custom emails - Organizers and co-organizers can customize the webinar email templates sent to attendees.
• Custom webinar reminder email send times - Webinar reminder emails are automatically sent to registrants an hour before the event starts. With Teams Premium, organizers can edit the send time to notify attendees sooner.
• Enable and manage the waitlist for webinars beyond capacity - When the webinar's registration reaches capacity, organizers can manage overflow registration requests through a waitlist.
• Hide attendee names - Meeting and webinar organizers can hide the names of attendees from other attendees in the stage, roster, and chat.
• Limit registration start and end times - Organizers can set a time window during which potential attendees can register for their webinar.
• Manage what attendees see - Webinar organizers can decide whose avatars or video feeds to spotlight during a Teams webinar while others are hidden from view.
• Manually approve registrants - Organizers can approve or deny requests to register for their webinar.
• Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP)-In - Organizers can produce their Teams webinar directly from an external hardware or software-based encoder.

Advanced Virtual Appointments

With any Microsoft 365 license, your end users can use basic Virtual Appointments capabilities to schedule and join business-to-customer meetings. For example, users can schedule appointments in the Bookings calendar and external attendees can join through a browser without having to download Teams.

To learn more about Virtual Appointments, see Manage the Virtual Appointments app for your organization in Microsoft Teams.

Teams Premium provides advanced Virtual Appointment capabilities, such as:

• Analytics at departmental and organizational levels
• Consumption and usage analytics for admins in the Teams admin center
• Custom lobby room with branding and logos​
• Queue of scheduled and on-demand appointments
• Short Message Service (SMS) notifications

Intelligent meeting features

Teams Premium provides the following key AI-powered meetings features:

• Decorate my background - Your users can use AI to decorate their backgrounds.
• Intelligent meeting recap - Give your users a more personalized rundown of their meetings with intelligent meeting recap.
• Live translated captions - Allow your users to see captions translated into the language they’re most comfortable with.
• Live translated transcription - Your users can understand each other better during a meeting or event by translating the meeting transcript into the language they're most comfortable with.

¹If you toggle the Transcription and Recording settings to Off in your Meeting policies, intelligent meeting recap isn't available for users with this policy.

More resources

You can find more resources here:

• Microsoft Teams Premium product site
• Teams Premium deployment guide
• Teams Premium user guide
• Microsoft Teams Premium blog