Mansoor Malik: A lot of times within the organization, the employees or information workers, um, there's certainly a brand affinity to the company or with the company that they work for. And they want to, they want to be able to see that brand within the work experience as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: Hi, and welcome back to the Teams insider podcast. This week, we have a bit of a tour of Microsoft Teams Premium. Teams Premium is a key focus for Microsoft at the moment. There's lots of features in there. A quite a complex sku with lots of value for different types of users. And Mansoor takes us through the sku, what the use cases are for it.

And some of the well known and lesser well known features as well. Many thanks to Mansoor for taking the time to jump on the pod. And also many thanks to Logitech who are the sponsor of the podcast. Really appreciate their support on with the show. Hi everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Excited for this one.

This is a big thing for Microsoft this year. We're going to be talking about Teams Premium and quite a wide suite of capabilities. And to talk about it, I've got Mansoor. Mansoor, would you like to introduce yourself? 

Mansoor Malik: Hey Tom, thanks for having me on your podcast. Yeah, this is Mansoor Malik. Hi everyone. I'm a group product manager for Teams Premium product.

Within Teams, I've been with Teams uh, uh, gosh, since its inception, we were a small team under Brian Mac and, uh, uh, incubating, uh, this little project, which now is Microsoft Teams used by hundreds of millions of users. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Yeah. From, uh, from a little project to, uh, to a massive, massive, uh, worldwide, you know, 320 million monthly active and all the rest.

It's really, really interesting journey. We could do a whole podcast on that, but that's another day, I guess. So Mansoor, we did a really good fireside chat a couple of months ago. We talked about Premium. I feel like you've got a challenging role because Premium is so wide and has so many capabilities, but I'm going to kind of challenge you to summarize kind of what, what is it?

And what's the use case? 

Mansoor Malik: Yeah, no, this is a great question. Look, when we, when we designed or came up with Teams Premium um, we did, um, a whole bunch of surveys, um, you know, from folks around the world. A lot of the information workers, I. T. Admins, business decisions, business decision makers. And, um, we built Teams Premium for organizations.

who want to run the entirety of their communications, including advanced workloads, workloads on Teams uh, as well as providing a workplace management solution. Um, there were emerging needs or top needs that we heard from the organizations from those surveys and, and basically as they Navigated the new challenges and opportunities of the hybrid workplace coming off, you know, pandemic, um, we sort out, like we saw three sort of main sort of components of that and or needs that were bubbling up the top, um, people were, you know, they, people were actually three times more in Teams meetings and calls per week across their employees.

Uh, as well as even outside the four walls of the organization. They were looking for engaging and customized and secure ways to communicate with their customers, partners, or even individual consumers, if you will. Um, secondly, um, they wanted to be more productive throughout the day. And what I mean by that is people were often, as I mentioned, were, were in a lot of meetings.

They just wanted to focus on what matters the most and stay on top of all the meetings. They wanted the tools to be able to quickly catch up, uh, rather than going through the entire recording of a meeting or, especially, especially in a case when they actually missed a meeting, or if they were double booked and they couldn't go to two different meetings.

Um, with, you know, with advanced tools like Intelligent Recap, now it's possible that you just kind of catch up, get the summary, and really get onto the action items, uh, what matters the most. Last but not least, Growing sort of security threat in the hybrid world, right? Over about 80 percent of the enterprises have actually moved.

to some sort of a hybrid model. Um, and many of us, including myself, I work out of, uh, my home now in Houston, used to be in Redmond before, um, really appreciate the flexibility with the hybrid work, right? I mean, it's, there are tools available and we, we are able to work remotely. However, in this new sort of paradigm, the IT admins have become increasingly concerned about sort of information leak, information leakage and, and, and emerging sort of security threats.

And that was another top concerns by the IT admins and IT leaders, which Teams Premium also tries to solve. So those are some of the personas and use cases that, if you will. That Teams Premium, um, you know, solves for, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, it's useful to understand kind of those pillars of, of, of sets of features, um, uh, and, and different, different scenarios there.

Maybe we could pick out some of the, um, hero features, which, which order you want to go in. But intelligent recap is, uh, definitely a slam dunk in my world. Like that is something that I couldn't couldn't go back from now. I don't know. I'm guessing that's been a popular one. 

Mansoor Malik: Yeah, 100 percent Intelligent Recap has been certainly a popular one.

It gets used a lot. Um, we do have other features as well. We've added since then. Um, recently, more recently, Places has come up, come into Teams Premium, uh, which, uh, is really valuable feature for folks that are again in this hybrid world. Like if you, um, are in a place where you're You know, you're contemplating between working from, um, home today versus going to the, um, to the office in the campus.

Um, you know, Places actually gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of finding out who else is going to be at work. And how you can make those engagements and meetings be more productive, um, you know, if you are in, in, uh, in campus. And at the same time, also Places provides, um, IT admins a way, um, to manage their sort of real estate and facilities in a much more robust way, uh, or effective manner, if you will.

They'll be able to optimize workspaces, and if something's not getting used for, uh, you know, one, particular sort of need, it could be optimized for another one. And things like that. So Places another one. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, you can you can map all your all your offices. You can book per room. You can see the rooms in the in the booking process as well.

We did a briefing on this. Actually, it's um, it's really interesting one in Premium because one of those ones that applies to a lot of the user base potentially can get value from that. 

Mansoor Malik: Right? And also the same. Another thing is Queues up as well, which we've added to it. Uh is is helping a lot of customers, um, you know, getting value of Teams Premium 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, so those are those are some good ones that probably have got some more airtime.

There's a whole lot Besides, what would you pick out that's a bit more either, uh, niche or probably under, under talked about in the, in the suite? 

Mansoor Malik: You know, that's an interesting question. Of course, there are some features or some capabilities that get used a lot more and some, you know, used a little less than, than that.

We designed Teams Premium to be sort of like a one stop shop for all of the advanced communication and flexible workplace needs. Uh, and it's across both sort of. Um, horizontal and some more specialized scenarios, but also key point here is, um, for your internal and external comms needs, right? Uh, you know, some of the things that we do, maybe not get a whole sort of light, um, but still is in Premium is I can think of the things like, um, advanced town hall or webinars, for example, um, you know, Leaders across the companies want to be able to reach out to their employees in a more structured way and, and have be more engaging way and, uh, and, you know, be able to just have that communication seamless.

So advanced town hall, for example, offers that. Some capabilities are already being, you know, launched in Premium town halls and some are still, you know, they're just coming, they're in the road map and they're just, you know, every, every month we're releasing software, um, in fact, more than once a month. So more, more of these features are coming, coming through.

Um, again, we talked about Queues app, which is also a little bit more new to Teams Premium. Um, you know. Uh, is is a lightweight sort of call handling solution for folks to who live in Teams to manage some of their external calls on. And it also allows folks like supervisors to handle call queues, different workloads and performance with sort of real time and historical reporting off the queues.

Um, and also leveraging things like. Silent coaching tools, monitor, barge, whisper, or even takeover. So, you know, there's, there's a whole slew of functionality again, as you mentioned, some gets, um, some is hero gets used a lot, some is there. So there's like tons of stuff that's already out there in Teams Premium, that's, that's, uh, for everyone and also 

Tom Arbuthnot: webinar, actually, I think is a really good one.

We use that a lot. We do a lot of events and I feel like webinar again, could, could for certain people can just justify that cost in itself. If you look at traditionally what those products cost and the kind of scale. Teams can go to for that stuff. And then you say town hall. That's, that's something that I know back in the day you typically would have outsourced.

You have a specialist third party and not only is it the value, but it's the ability to self service it within the organization. That's great. It's like I can do a town hall now without three months thoughts and budget and bringing in the external team and all that kind of stuff as well. 

Mansoor Malik: Right.

Absolutely. And, and as you mentioned, like, um, The value for all these tools that were scattered. Right? So as, as I said, organizations sort of, they emerged from, um, from pandemic, you know, they, they sort of put together all these different point solutions during pandemic, because it was, there was a need, they downloaded this software or subscribes to that, to that service or whatever.

And they sort of string together these point solutions, but it, you know, coming out of that now, it just, you know, it creates a lot of headache for, for IT admins to sort of integrate with different workloads and. And also for end users to be able to just tab, tab, you know, all tab between one app to another.

Which tool do I need to use to attend this kind of meeting or which tool do I need to go to attend that kind of webinar? It's just, it's very expensive both at the user's education standpoint, IT admin sort of, um, you know, uh, maintainability point of view. Um, which again, that's why we brought Teams Premium, which has a broad set of capabilities that enable All the organizations sort of consolidate these solutions and realize they're the value of the entire sort of package, if you will, 

Tom Arbuthnot: what what does it look like for customers?

Obviously, there's a it's an add on per user sku. There's a cost there. I think it's $10 list like how the customers go about. Finding the value thinking about the use case. I feel like it's almost a mini project to boast, understand the capabilities and then map them to. Okay, sales and marketing advanced webinar.

We're doing some product design stuff. The security watermarking features may be interesting there. How's that work with the customers you're working with? 

Mansoor Malik: Yeah, no, it's a great question. Basically, I think what you're trying to get at is really basically how do companies kind of define the ROI as as they go with it, right?

Yeah. Um, I think there's a few things. One is we did commission a, um, A study with Forrester, um, it was, it was a total economic impact or TEI for Teams Premium, um, that sort of quantified the impact, uh, among several sort of customers and found about almost a two to four times return on investment in the licensing cost.

Um, and notably the business case was positive in year one. So that study is available online publicly on Teams Premium's website and, you know, folks can download and as, as they are thinking and as they're rolling out Teams Premium, uh, just to kind of, you know, figure out their own situation. Um, also if organizations are looking to measure custom business cases, they can do so through the, uh, Microsoft Business Case Builder tool that's available as well.

And, um, you know, lastly, another thing is also important is, As organizations deploy Teams Premium, we also provide a usage dashboard in the Teams Admin Center, where IT admins can actually view the usage and transfer all the various sort of capabilities in Teams Premium and individual features and who's using what and where it's getting either potentially underutilized and where they can also manage the ROI for the license and swap the licenses out for where the need is.

So there are different ways for, for organizations to realize the value and actually not, not just realize, but also optimize it. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think that's a really good call out as well. The, um, like you buy it for this set of users because you think they've got this use case being able to see. Yes, they're they're doing webinars, or they're using the feature, or they're doing advanced stuff in town hall, or they're doing mesh, whatever it is, we're getting our value, or you say, conversely, actually, this, they haven't used it.

And we could have a different use case. And we can reuse that license potentially is, is really valid. 

Mansoor Malik: I will tell you, Tom, like some of the comparable functionality, it often costs organizations like multiples of the $10 list price that we have for Teams Premium. Yeah. If you look at across the broad spectrum.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And then there's like, there's some like features that surprised me working with customers. Things like the, uh, the meeting branding and managing the backgrounds. That's been a huge one for some of the customers I work with. You know, they, they, they want to have that branded lobby experience. They want to have their, their background set up professionally.

Mansoor Malik: Yeah, no, that's a good call out. In fact, we also talked to a couple of, uh, organizations that are very sort of brand centric, uh, and we interviewed them as well. Uh, and it's, it's interesting. It's not just, Hey, I want to have a customer or a client meeting or a partner meeting where I want to have my brand sort of show up.

While that that case absolutely resonates and it is the case, but we also often find out that a lot of times within the organization, the employees or information workers, um, there's certainly a brand affinity to the company or with the company that they work for. And they want to, they want to be able to see that brand within the work experience as well.

Um, it's just, you know, being able to modernize the tools that, you know, people use on a day to day basis. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. You work, you work in a physical office. You're going to have your brand on the walls all around. I'm part, I'm part of this. I hadn't really thought about that, but it makes sense. As you say, it's like, actually, I've This is where I work.

It's all our code logos during the joins.

Mansoor Malik: In fact, some of the companies, I won't name name, they're pretty brand heavy. They want us to do a lot more in this area and be able to have the logos show up in different Places. Or like you'd be surprised all the ideas that we came up or the customers came up with are amazing.

Like here's how you can integrate our brand into Teams like here or there or whatever. So it's really interesting. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I've seen the same thing on the room side with the, uh, first the branding of the background and now with the digital signage, again, people being able to control those surfaces for their brand is really important.

Right. And you're doing some work right now at a time of recording where you're kind of bringing this a bit more together in the Teams admin center as well. So Premium is going to have its own section and bring together license management and usage. Can you talk us through that a little bit? 

Mansoor Malik: Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you for asking. I think we just recently announced on the road map. Um, that the, uh, you know, Teams Premium will have its own dedicated dashboard and Teams admin center while you could still manage the license and everything sort of in some other Places to like Mac, for example, Microsoft Admin Center, but just being able to look at and get all up view in one place is going to be an amazing thing for I.

T. Admins. You'd be able to manage your licenses Look at their Teams their report usage reports, um, of, you know, who's, you know, using Teams Premium features and whatnot, and then also get requests for, for licenses from users and, um, you know, just understand the ROI there a little bit as well. So all of that's going to get consolidated into one place, and it's going to be pretty cool.

So we're looking forward for that as well. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it looks nice. I think from a discovery point of view, that's really important as well. Having it having Premium, have a home and being able to click in and control the settings for the different features. And, you know, as you said, there's a, there's a road map behind. Lots of those features. So more is coming along in that sku as well. 

Mansoor Malik: Yes, 100%. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Lastly, I want to touch on the security stuff a little bit because I feel like that's the area I'm weakest in understanding of the Premium sku. I know you've got watermarking in there, sensitivity labels. I think a lot's been done recently around transcription control and meeting controls.

Can you talk us through kind of those areas a little bit? 

Mansoor Malik: Yeah. So for transcript, there's, there's actually a lot of features and value that we've actually shipped. Uh, irrespective of the SKU, um, some of it is also in Teams Premium and, and as, as you can imagine with the new world of AI, um, especially in meetings where, you know, transcript, um, in recording and all of these things can actually just are not just the product itself, but also kind of like a service to AI, you know, as a service, for example, um, Being able to cont manage, who can record, who can transcribe, um, being able to like, control the, um, access to the, the, the artifacts.

There's a lot of work that, uh, that is getting done both in Premium as well as in Copilot license and, and some in core sku as well. Uh, in terms of letting users to be able to control and have, um, sort of like, um, um. You know, peace of mind, basically. Hey, if this meeting is getting recorded, sure, it's going to have a transcript and it's going to have the value of AI, but at the same time, uh, you can control things like, you know, who has access to it or where does it go?

Where does the store, uh, even further things we're thinking in terms of like we did launch, you know, uh, being able to prevent copy and paste of chats. What does that mean for, you know, now in the world of AI, how do we take it further so that There's again security around the communication that's happening.

So it's a lot more, um, to do with, you know, just thinking about meeting protections and how do we actually protect your data and protect basically what goes around in this meeting, stays in this meeting, so to speak. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So for the customers listening who maybe haven't played with Premium yet, where would they start?

Let's say I'm a multi thousand user org. That's a big conversation, right? It's a what would you say are the ways to start picking a group, seeing some value? 

Mansoor Malik: Yeah, as I mentioned, Tom, Teams Premium sort of includes, um, Um, you know, a very sort of broadly horizontal value for, for the daily needs of enterprise information workers.

Um, we've also been seeing good, sort of seeing good traction among small organizations in the SMB segment as well. So I'd say the two sort of main key questions companies can start with, and this is just a starting point, uh, in terms of evaluating the need for, Um, you know, those information workers that would need Teams Premium is who in my organization is sort of working hybrid across campus and home office, um, as well as who in my organization regularly, you know, organizes or participates in meetings and calls, be it internal, be it external, like it could be a, you know, a B2B call or a B2C call or, You know, uh, a virtual consult, if you will, like an attorney client, uh, or doctor patient visit, or financial advisory call, or things like that.

So, all of those cases. Um, and I think if you look at the, the vast majority of us sort of meet at least one of those conditions. And I think therefore is a, sort of like a good fit to start off with Teams Premium. Um, as I mentioned, there's additional sort of considerations as well. For example, Um, town hall and webinar, as I mentioned, like if you, if you have leaders, you know, everywhere in every organization, leaders want to be able to communicate their voice to the end users and customers were actually remote.

So town hall is a Premium town hall. As I said, we've launched a whole bunch of capabilities in that already more is coming to be able to have a structured meeting, being able to have that, um, you know, Present, like really professional sort of broadcast type presentation and town hall, you know, Teams Premium is your solution.

Um, so again, looking at that, and then I think last but not least, as you mentioned security as well, I'll touch on that. You know, there's, there's folks that are, or there are certain departments that we actually certainly want to, uh, R, you know, R& D or whatnot. They may want to, you know, they are having meetings, for example, which are of sensitive in nature.

Uh, or there's confidentiality that's discussed in those meetings, which need to be protected either again through these access controls that we mentioned or, um, you know, watermark, as you mentioned, or, or maybe it needs to be completely end to end encrypted. So those are some of the considerations that I think companies should take a look at, uh, in deciding who in within their company Teams Premium is suited for.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's useful. It feels like you've got some good hooks there for like, cause I feel like it's quite a, because it has so many options, it's quite intimidating in a sense to be like, okay, where's it fit. But if you can start with, okay, I'm going to talk to marketing about external webinars. I'm going to look at my highest meeting users and maybe they're good for recap.

I'm going to talk to services about potentially. Queues or like you say R and D about security. I can start to pick some use cases. Um, and then it's interesting if things like you mentioned hybrid, if Places are broadly applicable, that's where I think you're hitting a tipping point where you're like, actually, we could now make sense for more people to have Premium and we get the value of.

Everything in this game. 

Mansoor Malik: Yeah, I think three sort of key pillars I would keep in mind again, communication, whether it's internal or external expanded communication, as well as meeting protections or protect protecting your sort of information within those meetings or interactions and more sort of advanced intelligent workplace in terms of hybrid and, you know, in office.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, thanks for taking that through to us through that one. So that was really useful. We'll definitely have to do this again. We'll let a few more of the roadmap items come out. And then if you're up for it, we'll do a another one on kind of what's new in Premium maybe later in the year. 

Mansoor Malik: Yeah, no, absolutely.

And as I mentioned, Queues app, I think there's going to be another one that you're diving deep with Scott or other. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yes, yeah, we've got Scott queued up to a specific part of the Queues app. That'll be a good one. 

Mansoor Malik: That'll be a good one to tune into. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. 

Thanks for your time Mansoor and so we'll talk again soon. 

Mansoor Malik: Thank you, Tom.

Great. Great to have this meeting.