Today, we are excited to unveil the latest innovations coming to Microsoft Teams Premium to make collaboration more intelligent, engaging, and protected. This post provides details for all the Teams Premium features and solutions announced at Microsoft Ignite. To read about innovations across Microsoft Teams check out What’s New in Microsoft Teams, Ignite Edition.
Contents
More intelligent
Decorate your background
Channel announcement backgrounds
Intelligent speaker support in BYOD rooms
More protected
Advanced Collaboration Tools
Priority account chat controls
Advanced collaboration analytics
Watermarking
Customization of watermark display
Watermark support for recording playback
Increased E2EE capacity
Controlled-content meeting template
Turn off copying or forwarding of meeting chat
More engaging
Hide attendee names in webinars and meetings
Advanced Town Halls
Additional tenant level analytics
SMS notifications for the Virtual Appointments template
Customizing immersive spaces in Microsoft Mesh
Get started with Teams Premium today
More intelligent
Decorate your background
Make meetings more fun and personal with Decorate your background. Meeting participants can now use generative background effects in Teams to show up at their best – even when the space they’re working from isn’t at its best. With Decorate your background, meeting participants can use the power of AI to generate a background that decorates and enhances their real-world room, such as by cleaning up clutter or adding plants to a wall. Coming early 2024.
Decorate your background will be available in early 2024.
Channel announcement backgrounds
Create a personalized announcement background that harnesses your creativity and engages your team in new ways. Add your own image, type a description, or use the power of AI to generate your personalized background. Creating an image using generative AI will be available in Teams Premium and Copilot for Microsoft 365.
Channel announcement backgrounds will be generally available later this month, November 2023.
Intelligent speaker support in BYOD rooms
We are committed to improving the experience in what are commonly referred to as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) rooms. This commitment encompasses a range of new features designed to enhance productivity for end-users and empower IT administrators with more effective management capabilities. Previously only available in Teams Rooms, intelligent speakers will now also be supported in BYOD rooms for users with Teams Premium or Copilot for Microsoft 365. Intelligent speakers, such as the Jabra PanaCast 50, ensure in-room participants maintain their identity in the meeting transcript, enhancing the accuracy of AI-based productivity tools such as intelligent recap and M365 Copilot.
To learn more about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) rooms, read the deep dive blog post here.
Intelligent speaker support in BYOD rooms will be generally available by the end of 2023.
More protected
Advanced Collaboration Tools
Advanced Collaboration Tools in Teams Premium empower administrators with refined control and in-depth insights into their organization's collaborative framework, to help strike the right balance between fostering collaboration and enhancing security.
Priority account chat controls
Priority account chat controls empower users to manage unwanted internal communications via a policies setting. Users are notified about chats from new contacts, giving them a choice to accept or block the conversations.
To learn more, read https://aka.ms/TeamsPremiumACT.
Priority account chat controls will be generally available by the end of this month, November 2023.
Advanced collaboration analytics
Advanced collaboration analytics offer deep insights into external collaboration behaviors. This empowers Teams admins to facilitate successful collaboration and mitigate risks of external collaboration. Advanced collaboration analytics highlight users, teams, and guests most involved in external collaboration and deliver actionable recommendations for IT admins (e.g., creating relevant policies) to foster safer external collaboration.
To learn more, read https://aka.ms/TeamsPremiumACT.
Advanced collaboration analytics is available now.
Watermarking
Watermarking for Teams meetings with Teams Premium helps deter information or data leaks when sharing sensitive information. A watermark can be applied to both the screen share feed and the participant video feeds. The watermark seen by each participant will display the viewer’s email address, so in the event a screenshot is taken, it can be traced back to the email displayed in the screenshot. Watermarking can be enabled by meeting organizers with Teams Premium licensing in the meeting options pane when scheduling a meeting. Additionally, IT can create meeting templates with Teams Premium that enable or enforce watermarking.
Customization of watermark display
Teams meeting organizers now have flexibility in how the watermark displays during the meeting when enabled. Organizers can select between a single display of the watermark or a repeated display which displays the watermark multiple times. Organizers can also adjust the transparency level of the watermark from 1% low visibility to 100% full visibility. The watermark will display the viewer's email on top of the shared content and/or video feed in a clean and unobtrusive manner. When the watermark option is enabled via Meeting options, the watermark will be enforced for all meeting attendees.
Customization of watermark display is now available.
Watermark support for recording playback
Meeting recording can now be enabled when watermarking is applied for a Teams meeting. An email ID will be displayed as the watermark during the meeting recording playback. Once a meeting has concluded, users can access the recorded content on both web and mobile platforms to watch the recording with watermarking.
Watermark support for recording will be generally available later this month, November 2023.
Increased E2EE capacity
With Teams Premium, customers can now leverage an increased capacity for end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) Teams meetings with support for up to 200 participants in the meeting experience. IT must enable E2EE in the Teams Admin Center to enable users to leverage the E2EE meeting option.
Increased E2EE capacity is now available.
Controlled-content meeting template
Teams Premium now includes a new, out-of-the-box template that can be useful when meeting with external participants. The controlled-content meeting template has preset defaults for meeting options to provide tight controls over lobby bypass, who can present, allowing chat in lobby/in-meeting, and who can record.
Controlled-content meeting template is now available.
Turn off copying or forwarding of meeting chat
“Turn off copying or forwarding of meeting chat" is a new meeting option that enables the meeting organizer to disable copying and sharing features on meeting chat messages to help reduce the risk of data leaks. Once this meeting option is enabled, meeting chat participants will not be able to copy chat messages using menu option, unable to copy through a keyboard shortcut, and unable to forward messages or share messages to Outlook. The meeting option is available today and will also become available to configure or enforce through meeting templates and policies by end of 2023.
Turn off copying or forwarding of meeting chat is now available.
More engaging
Below are new capabilities for webinars and our recent introduction of town halls - check out more recent innovations for webinars and town halls in the blog here.
Hide attendee names in webinars and meetings
Organizers can hide the names of attendees from other attendees during webinars and meetings. This helps maintain the privacy of attendees and helps attendees to stay focused on the content. When hide attendee names is enabled in the meeting options, it hides the attendee’s name, profile photo, and profile card information from other attendees in the event. Only the organizers, co-organizers, and presenters are still able to see the attendee’s name and profile card information, which appears as ‘Attendee’ and their name in parentheticals next to it (e.g., Attendee (Jane Doe). When attendees view the people roster, they see each attendee listed as ‘Attendee’. When attendees utilize chat, their names will be hidden. When attendees utilize Q&A, the organizer will need to enable the anonymous posting option within Q&A to ensure that attendee names remain hidden when submitting questions.
Hide attendee names in webinars and meetings will be generally available by the end of November.
Advanced Town Halls
We previously introduced Town halls in Microsoft Teams, a new experience to host and deliver large-scale, internal events to create connections across an organization. Town halls will provide a one-to-many format with advanced production capabilities and a structured approach for attendee engagement. With town halls, customers can host various types of internal as well as external events including company-wide town halls, all hands, global team meetings, internal broadcasts, fireside chats, and more. Advanced functionality in town hall includes additional scale of up to 20,000 attendees with Q&A support, up to 50 concurrent events across a tenant, real-time insights, customizable email templates, eCDN support, additional language support for live translated captions, and more. Advanced functionality in town hall requires a Teams Premium license.
Advanced town halls are generally available.
Additional tenant level analytics
New insights are available at a tenant level in the virtual appointments app. These include average lobby wait times for scheduled vs. on-demand appointments, percentage of appointments completed after scheduled end time, and percentage of appointments with a late start. This data provides IT admins with data points to evaluate the current state of their virtual appointment program and plan for future improvements at a tenant level.
Tenant level analytics are generally available.
SMS notifications for the Virtual Appointments template
Virtual appointment organizers can send text message notifications to reduce no shows and make it easier for attendees to join virtual appointments through their mobile devices when setting up appointments through the Teams calendar tab. Attendees will receive a personalized confirmation and reminder text message with details of their appointment including the date, time, and meeting join link. This feature can be enabled directly on the virtual appointments template within the Teams calendar. SMS notifications for the virtual appointments template are currently available in the United States.
SMS notifications for the Virtual Appointments template are generally available.
Virtual Appointment Graph API for SMS notifications
Microsoft Graph API for Virtual Appointment SMS notifications allows developers to programmatically send confirmation, update, reminder, and cancellation SMS notifications to customers. Developers send the “notification type”, “customer phone number”, and “reminder mins ahead” properties in the payload to configure the SMS notifications. The API support for SMS notifications is currently available in the United States and notifications can be sent to US phone numbers. Note, while the API is not part of Teams Premium, for the SMS notifications to be utilized, it requires the appointment organizer to be licensed with Teams Premium.
Virtual Appointment Graph API for SMS notifications is available in beta.
Customizing immersive spaces in Microsoft Mesh
Today at Ignite we announced that custom immersive experiences will be coming to Teams Premium in January. Using a no-code editor or the Mesh toolkit you can create custom immersive spaces in Microsoft Mesh that are tailored to your specific business needs such as employee events, training, guided tours, or internal product showcases.
With the Mesh editor in the menu bar, you can customize immersive experiences to address the unique needs of your event—without writing a line of code. Event creators can select from a set of ready-to-use immersive spaces, customize them by adding images, videos, and screen share in a shared 3D canvas, and have them show up in an event in an orchestrated way. Once these objects are added, change the size and position, or put the video on loop so it fits right into your event. These customizations can then be saved as a template for anyone in the organization to reuse.
For a greater degree of customization, you can use the Mesh toolkit to leverage the power of Unity for fully customizable immersive experiences.
To learn more about Microsoft Mesh, read the deep dive blog post here.
These Mesh capabilities will be generally available in Teams Premium in January 2024.
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