Microsoft will launch a self-service trial for Teams Premium, rolling out in general availability starting next month.

Exclusive to business customers, the 30-day trial will empower companies to explore Teams Premium’s advanced, AI-powered feature set without committing to full, paid licences. Each business with a trial license can equip up to 25 users to trial Teams Premium’s features during the 30 days, including intelligent meeting recaps, virtual appointments and personalised management tools.

The official 365 Roadmap reads:

When rolled out, users within your organization will be able to directly initiate a Teams Premium trial(…) Microsoft Teams Premium helps make your Teams meetings more intelligent, protected, and engaging. Unlike other meeting and collaboration tools, Teams Premium brings advanced capabilities for meetings, virtual appointments, and webinars together for one low cost.”

Users can directly initiate a team trial within their organisational tenant and cancel at any time, while admins can manage these trials like their other Microsoft subscriptions and have complete visibility of their usage.

Users inside a customer’s business can initiate the trial using their Azure Active Directory (AAD)/Entra ID credentials without inputting payment information. Admins will have control over whether the trials convert to paid licences as there is no auto-renew functionality — if a user within the organisation would like to upgrade to the paid subscription, they will need to collaborate with the admin to do so.

To prepare for the arrival of Teams Premium trials, admins can access self-service purchase controls to disable self-service trials while leveraging the subscription management capabilities to control trial licenses on the “Your Products” page in the “Billing” space of the Microsoft 365 admin centre.

The trials will begin rolling out in late September and will not be available for Government customers. Trial licenses will be separate from existing Teams Premium licenses within the organisation.

Teams Premium – The Story So Far

Teams Premium was first revealed at Microsoft Ignite in October 2022, promising to offer “more personalised, intelligent and secure” meetings.

While built on the collaborative experience of Teams, Teams Premium introduced next-gen technologies to the platform, including Large Language Models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.

Nicole Herskowitz, Vice President of Microsoft Teams, described Teams Premium: “Built on the familiar, all-in-one collaboration experience of Microsoft Teams, this new offering makes every meeting from one-on-ones to large meetings, to virtual appointments to webinars more personalised, intelligent, and secure.”

Teams Premium stated that it would deliver personalised and intelligent meetings and webinars, improved meeting protection, intelligent management and reporting capabilities for IT, and advanced Virtual Appointments.

Teams Premium first entered its preview phase last December and was billed as an add-on licence to enhance the Teams experience before launching in general availability in February.

“Modern tools powered by AI hold the promise to boost individual, team, and organisational-level productivity and fundamentally change how we work,” Herskowitz commented on the launch. “This promise is rapidly becoming a reality. At Microsoft, we’re working to incorporate new, AI-powered capabilities across our consumer and enterprise products, including Microsoft Teams.

The first key feature, Intelligent Recap in Teams Premium, means users can automatically receive generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalised highlights to help infer the most critical information, even if they don’t attend the meeting. Intelligent Recap also adds AI-generated chapters that divide the meeting into sections to make catching up on meetings more efficient.

Teams Premium also enables users to personalise Teams meetings distinct to their organisation, allowing users to host branded meetings for all participants to see the logo and colours of their business. IT admins can also produce customised meeting templates to include the correct settings specific to their organisation automatically.

Teams Premium also has advanced meeting protection, so meetings can be upgraded to include excellent confidentiality and security safeguards without detracting from the meeting experience. There are also watermark capabilities to deter leaks and the function to limit who can record the discussion.

In July, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed in an earnings call that Teams Premium had already achieved more than 600,000 users despite only becoming generally available less than half a year previously.



from UC Today https://ift.tt/ICe5n4r