UCStatus Podcast Episode 49: Microsoft Teams Premium Licensing

Hello Readers, I hope you’re well.

Welcome to Episode 49 of the UCStatus Podcast. This episode features me (@randychapman), Mark Vale (@markvale83) and Shawn Harry (@shawnharry).

This week we chat about the Teams Premium licensing and the features inside.

The list of features in Premium are broken down into 5 separate categories. And therein, 5 types of users or user needs.

Premium features to make meetings more Secure

End-to-end Encryption option for meetings (E2EE)
Watermark
Who can record
Sensitivity labels for meetings with prevent copy option prereq: E5 license

Premium features to make meetings more Personalized

Meeting templates
Custom branding
Custom backgrounds for organizations
Organization together mode scenes
Custom user policy packages

Premium features to make meetings more Intelligent

Live translated captions temporarily available as preview for all Microsoft customers
Intelligent meeting recap features will be not available for the December Preview trial.

Advanced Webinars

Advanced registration capabilities with waitlist, manual approval, and limit registration date/time
Virtual Green Room
Manage what attendees see
Microsoft eCDN for Teams Live Events

Advanced Virtual Appointments

Virtual Appointment App
Virtual Appointment Analytics
SMS reminders

For a full description of these features check out Microsoft’s blog post here Get Started with Microsoft Teams Premium – Microsoft Community Hub.

We don’t go in depth on any of the features. We talk more about the requirement for the license and who it could be for.

Surely everyone who attends a lot of meetings is going to want the intelligent recap feature. In December when it’s available according to the blog post. That license could make you and your users more productive assuming it works as well as they think it will. But that doesn’t mean those users will want or need any of the other features in premium.

Same for virtual appointments. That’s only for a small subset or users surely. They need that license. But they don’t care about the webinar stuff or anything else on the list for that matter.

And what about the admin stuff? Do you really need to license every person in your org just so you can package your policies instead of assigning them one at a time?

We think most of the features in premium are great additions to Teams. But one feature or even one feature category isn’t worth the cost if you only need one thing from it.Sorry Microsoft but we think the Premium license is a tough pill to swallow.

All in all this episode is a bit of a rant from us. But as always we had a lot of fun so have a listen and let us know what you think.

Would you buy Premium for all yoru users just to get one thing from it?
How many things from premium would you need to use regularly for it to be worth the price?

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave a comment below.