Microsoft invites customers to try Teams Premium preview trial

Microsoft announced that Teams Premium is now available as a preview, giving interested customers a chance to join the trial and experience the additional superior features of the service before it generally rolls out in February 2023.

“Today, we are excited to share that we are making Microsoft Teams Premium broadly available for preview as a limited trial for our commercial customers through the Microsoft 365 admin center,” announces Margi Desai, a product manager for Microsoft Teams, in a blog post. “The features under this offering began rolling out this December and will continue to roll out through January.”

Teams Premium, as reported in October, delivers a bunch of new features, ticking the different sections of the communication-collaboration platform and making them “more personalized, intelligent, and secure.” Some of the features include meeting branding (for putting custom logos and backgrounds in the meeting lobby), meeting guides (guides in the selection of appropriate meeting type like client call, brainstorming meeting, or help desk call), and intelligent meeting recap (AI-based suggestions and intelligent recap with autogenerated chapters and highlighted insights).

Other big highlights of the Teams Premium are the live translated captions from 40 spoken languages, advanced meeting protection to prevent leaks and limit who can record, advanced Virtual Appointments, text reminders for customers, custom branded virtual appointments, appointment queuing for managing appointments in a single place, and ability to view Teams-related analytics like trends and history. There will also be Advanced Webinars, allowing users to have new host controls and event management controls. Additionally, Premium will include a registration waitlist and manual approval that keep webinar registration open even after the capacity is reached, allowing people to still register and automatically be added to the waitlist. Microsoft provides a detailed list of all these features and more on its blog.

Enrolling in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center will allow admins to get a limited number of free Teams Premium trial licenses, which are good for 30 days. After this preview, Microsoft says customers who already have Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licenses can get Teams Premium as an add-on in February 2023.

The new offer is just one of the many new things that arrived at Teams. Recently, Microsoft also announced that it finally integrated Adobe Acrobat into Microsoft Teams and even introduced the new Communities feature that allows users to create communities dedicated to specific groups. In the Microsoft 365 roadmap, more features are expected to be generally released to public customers in 2023, including Teams casting from a mobile device to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, video un-mirroring feature, LinkedIn integration, self-chat feature, chat pinning, and more.