Teams Premium features take meetings, webinars, and administration settings to the next level. Advanced branding settings, enhanced encryption, AI-powered meeting recap and much more. Those features are released as a preview, and you can test it right away.
In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at some of the key features and benefits of a Microsoft Teams Premium license.
Premium features
Teams Premium features require additional licenses for users – Teams Premium license. You have to acquire required amount of the licensed to get those features. But what’s inside?



Pretty huge list! Some features are small additions to existing ones, and some are game changers that I want now! Keep in mind that all those goodies are in preview and some of them are still in development stage and are not available now.
Trial activation process
How to test it out?
The license is available as a 30-day trial right now so you can easily go and test all features.
1. Go to Microsoft 365 Admin Center (https://admin.microsoft.com/), navigate to Billing and then to Purchase services section and search for Teams Premium. If you can’t find it on the page you case this link – https://aka.ms/tpdlnk. It will open the activation page.

2. Activate the license
3. Assign the license to the users

Features
I won’t go through all features but I’ll show you most significant and great features right now. You can find detailed list on Microsoft blog site – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-premium-preview-now-available/ba-p/3699262
Meeting templates
This one is one of my favorites. Right now you have to configure meeting settings for each meeting manually. This feature allows you to create presets for different meeting types (e.g., workshop, HR call, project meeting) and use them.
You can find templates settings in Teams Admin Center. Go to the Meetings section and then to the Meeting templates options. You can create a new template or modify existing one. Each template has security settings, audio and video, recording and transcriptions, roles, and meeting engagement options.

In the Meeting template policies section, you can assign a template to specific group of people.

Who can record a meeting
Today a meeting can be recorded by an organizer or an attendee from your organization. With the new options you can control who will be able to press the record button. This can be configured per meeting or as a part of a meeting template.

Meeting branding
These features will be released to preview mode in January. You will be able to create a custom meeting lobby theme, a custom meeting templates for your organization, add custom meeting backgrounds (this one is already available), and create predefined Together mode scenes for your users.

Watermarks
This one adds users e-mail address as a watermark to video and shared content. It can be helpful to protect sensitive information and minimize chance to use screenshots or screen recording from such meeting. You can use this as an additional security layer.
You can enable watermarks in Teams Meeting policies in Teams Admin Center

Meeting Encryption
End-to-end meeting encryption protects audio, video, and screen sharing. Chat, files sharing, and other content are protected by default Microsoft 365 encryption.
Live captions and transcriptions, recording, together mode, companion mode, large gallery, and breakout rooms aren’t available during encrypted meetings.

Webinars
Teams Premium enables a new set of features for webinars – Registration Waitlist, Manual Approval, Limit registration start and end time, enhanced webinar form, Virtual Green Room, manage what attendees can see, and more.
For example, the new enhanced webinar form provides you easy way to configure you webinar.

You can also configure waitlist for your webinar, enable manual approval process, and limit registration date and time.

You can also enable the Green Room for the webinar in the meetings options.

The Green Room is a lobby for your webinars. You can prepare your scene and materials, while attendees will see only welcome page. When you’re ready just press Start meeting button.

Summary
Teams Premium license is a huge step forward. Many advanced features for meetings and webinars are coming. All those features will require add-on (Teams Premium) – so it’s not for free. Right now, you can test it using the Trial version (valid for 30 days) and when it will fully available you can decide if it’s worth the price.
Some existing features will be moved from existing Teams license to the Premium one:
- Live translated captions.
- Timeline markers in Teams meeting recordings for when a user left or joined meetings.
- Custom organization Together mode scenes.
- Virtual Appointments: SMS notifications.
- Virtual Appointments: Organizational analytics in the Teams admin center.
- Virtual Appointments: Scheduled queue view.
Admins will get notification and 30-days grace period to decide what to do with those features (but Premium licenses or lost these functionalities). I will play with some more feature in upcoming weeks and post more advanced details about them.
2 Comments
Hi Marcin,
Thank you for the summary.
If the organization would like to use premium features, do they need to purchase premium licenses org-wide or just for selected users who most often organize meetings and webinars?
For most features you need to purchase licenses only for those who organize meeting and webinars.