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The latest round-up of feature Microsoft updates for February include a grand reveal of innovations for Teams Premium
Published: March 2, 2023
Jonny Wills
Senior Editor
In a month when Microsoft launched its Teams Premium licence, the collaboration platform was also buoyed by the news in its Q2/FY23 earnings call that it now has 280 million active users, with five million PSTN seats added to Teams phone.
Our Microsoft Teams News Update discusses these major developments with all the news from the ISE 2023 in Barcelona and features UC Today’s Rob Scott hosting Microsoft Teams Expert and Co-Founder of Empowering.Cloud, Tom Arbuthnot, together with a select panel of industry experts.
For a further in-depth introduction, read the article What is Teams Premium?
For a look-back at all the recently added new features elsewhere across the ecosystem read our Microsoft Teams Recap for February 2023.
In the meantime, these new features are now available for the new Teams Premium licence.
Intelligent Recap, Live Translation and Meeting Templates are new features boosted by AI power.
Intelligent recap means hosts can save time spent reviewing meeting recordings. AI-generated chapters, powered by PowerPoint Live, divide meetings into sections based on the content of a presentation, making it easier to select the most relevant segments. Intelligent Recap also generates meeting chapters based on meeting minutes in the future.
Additionally, when an attendee joins or leaves a meeting, a personalised timeline marker visible only to the user recalls the recording so they can quickly click through to hear what was missed. The marker expands to show when the user’s name is mentioned and when the screen is shared. Both these features are available now.
Live translation is now available in Teams Premium but can only be used if the host has it. The AI-powered real-time translation comes in 40 spoken languages. Normal subtitles are shown in the language spoken during the meeting by default.
IT admins can now create custom Meeting Templates (customer calls, brainstorming meetings, helpdesk calls, etc.) in Teams Premium to automatically include the correct settings, making conference call creation and organisation more accessible and reducing the time and thought process required. Templates also allow leaders to ensure meetings adhere to the company’s best practices and policies.
Branded Meetings mean companies can display their logo and colours when they enter a meeting and incorporate the brand colours into the conference itself. In the meeting, attendees can deploy brand-centric organisation backgrounds and organisation together mode scenes.
IT departments can also save time by creating custom policy packages for users with similar roles: a simplified and streamlined tool for consistent user group policy management across an organisation.
Teams Premium users can now host events with Advance webinars bringing seamless registration and customised experiences. This includes webinars that make it easy to host events. For example, when users are facing customers to grow their business or implementing online training for the entire enterprise, bringing both presenters and attendees together for a personalised touch. In addition, and not requiring add-on solutions or cross-platform work, advanced webinars save time and money.
Making it easier to manage registrations before a meeting is the new feature Registration waitlist and manual approval. Enabling the waitlist will keep webinar registration open even after the event has reached the capacity set by the organiser and encourages more people to register and be automatically added to the list. When new places become free, people are automatically placed in pending approval status. Hosts can review the registration information and manually approve or reject each registrant.
Virtual green room allows presenters to participate in a virtual green space, supporting pre-webinar preparation. Presenters have time and space to connect and conduct short briefings and test runs without disturbing participants. Attendees can also interact with moderators and other attendees through chat and Q&A while waiting for the event to start. Webinar hosts also can implement Customized registration start and end times, making event planning and management more effortless.
Moderators can more effectively control what attendees see during a webinar with Manage what attendees see. These host controls make it simpler to create professionally-produced events and more dynamic engagements for presenters and attendees.
Hosts can now integrate various external media feeds into a webinar using RTMP In (Real-Time Messaging Protocol). Hosts can broadcast their custom RTMP source live to all meeting participants by enabling RTMP-in with an external encoder. Examples of this are a professional video or a high-quality screen share.
Available now in Teams Premium, the event feature Improve live event experiences (Microsoft eCDN) gathers live-stream global meetings, gatherings and town halls and delivers company-wide training with Teams Live Events. Microsoft eCDN offloads corporate networks, avoids connection dropouts and poor video quality and requires no additional installation on endpoints or devices.
A new Teams session type for meeting business-to-customers (B2C) is Advanced Virtual Appointments, a new Teams-tailored meeting type tailored for people outside your organisation. Guests receive a meeting invitation with the appointment details and can quickly attend via SMS or email. Attendees can join from any device (no need to install Teams) and wait in a convenient pre-meeting virtual lobby until ready.
The Virtual Appointments app is now available to download in the Teams app store and is a central place for professionals and admins to create and manage on-demand virtual appointments scheduled in Microsoft Teams. It includes a comprehensive dashboard that provides a quick overview of employee schedules, integrated with Bookings. Teams Premium unlocks a snapshot of the user’s appointment queue, a summary of their analytics, and options for managing appointments.
The Queue view of scheduled and on-demand appointments facilitates employees to manage and wait for virtual appointments in one place, while advanced functionality for tracking wait times and checking meeting status. Admin can conduct virtual appointments and monitor incoming requests and act accordingly. Schedulers can also set up an on-demand entry point for customers to request services and appointments through a hosted, branded, self-service website.
Custom virtual lobby for Virtual Appointments: This feature does what it says on the tin. Users can create custom waiting rooms for external attendees to ensure a branded, premium environment. The virtual lobby can be customised with a company logo, branding, and more.
Critical metrics for analysis, such as no-shows, wait times, and calendar-level analytics to drive outcomes and improve CX, are a part of Virtual Appointments individual and departmental analytics. Report types include trends over time and the facility to nail individual due dates.
Finally, with Virtual Appointment’s organisational level analytics, admins of Virtual Appointments can view aggregated analytics across departments and organisations. Admins and operators can also view detailed activities for appointments created and executed across multiple plan entry points and date ranges. The report also includes information about users active in features unlocked in Teams Premium, such as SMS and two-way chat in waiting rooms and queues. The data can also be exported for extra analysis in Excel.
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