In today’s business environment, effective communication and collaboration are crucial for the success of any organization. As businesses continue to adapt to remote work environments and global operations, the need for a comprehensive and reliable unified communications solution has become more important than ever. Microsoft Teams, a leader in Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), has emerged as a powerful platform that not only facilitates seamless communication but also offers advanced AI capabilities, enhanced security, and personalized experiences. In this blog, we will explore the various features and benefits that make Microsoft Teams the go-to choice for businesses of all sizes, as recognized by Gartner, and how it empowers users, IT professionals, and business leaders to achieve their communication goals efficiently and effectively.

Microsoft Teams: A Leader in Unified Communications as a Service

Teams has once again been recognized as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, marking the fifth consecutive year that Microsoft has received this recognition. This acknowledgment from Gartner emphasizes Microsoft’s commitment to providing a comprehensive UC platform through Teams.

Teams offers a wide range of communication and collaboration tools, including telephony, meetings, and messaging, making it a versatile solution for organizations. The recognition from Gartner also highlights Microsoft’s investment in UCaaS offerings and Teams, particularly their focus on availability, reliability, and advanced intelligence.

Microsoft has continuously introduced new capabilities into Teams, with an impressive 635 new features shipped in the past year alone. This commitment to innovation ensures that Teams is built with next-generation technologies, delivering a unified experience for all communication and collaboration needs.

The vision of Teams is to be a smart place to work, enabling people to achieve more together. This vision has been realized through the introduction of Teams Premium, which brings together advanced capabilities across Teams. This premium offering helps business leaders address new opportunities and adapt to the evolving work environment, making collaboration in Teams more intelligent, protected, and engaging.

For Teams users, IT professionals, and business leaders, this recognition from Gartner solidifies Teams as a robust and user-friendly tool for day-to-day conversations, meetings, and collaboration. With Microsoft’s continuous investment in UCaaS and Teams, organizations can confidently choose Teams as their unified communications solution.

Gartner Recognition and Positioning of Teams

When it comes to making smart investment decisions in technology, the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ is a valuable tool. It provides a graphical competitive positioning of technology providers, allowing users to assess their execution against their current vision and their positioning for the future.

In the case of Teams, it has received recognition and positioning in the Magic Quadrant due to its exceptional performance and future potential. With over 10,000 customers in just eight months, Teams Premium has become an essential tool for everyday work.

Teams Premium stands out with its built-in and automated AI capabilities that are specifically designed for Teams. These capabilities enhance collaboration and meeting experiences, making every interaction more intelligent, engaging, and protected.

Working hand-in-hand with Copilot for Microsoft 365, Teams Premium is part of the vision for intelligent productivity. It offers generative AI capabilities that save time and effort on routine tasks, allowing users to focus on higher value work. For example, the intelligent recap feature automatically delivers AI-generated notes after each meeting, freeing users from the burden of capturing action items and enabling them to focus on the discussion.

Furthermore, Teams Premium provides additional features to enhance meeting recordings. Chapters and topics divide the recordings into sections, making it easy to find specific content. Personalized timeline and speaker markers allow for efficient navigation, ensuring users can quickly access the parts of the recording that are most relevant to them.

It’s worth noting that Teams Premium’s intelligent recap feature supports multiple languages, promoting natural collaboration among teams from different regions. This enables users to receive AI-generated notes and tasks in their preferred language, further enhancing communication and productivity.

In summary, Teams Premium has gained recognition and positioning in the Gartner Magic Quadrant due to its user-friendly and well-designed product. It offers a robust tool for day-to-day conversations and meetings, with its AI capabilities providing a significant advantage for organizations. With Teams Premium, users can expect a highly productive and efficient collaboration experience.

The smart place to work: Teams Premium

With more than 10,000 customers in the first eight months, Teams Premium has become essential to how people get work done every day. Teams Premium provides several built-in and automated AI capabilities, specific to Teams, that streamline how users can begin to harness the power of AI to optimize their collaboration and meeting experience. These capabilities work hand-in-hand with Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Teams, your AI assistant at work, to complete our vision of intelligent productivity.  

Intelligent productivity, so you can focus on what matters 

Teams Premium offers out-of-the-box generative AI capabilities that are easy to start with to help you save time and effort on routine tasks so you can focus on higher value work. With intelligent recap, AI-generated notes are automatically delivered after each meeting to help you focus on the discussion, not on capturing action items. Chapters and topics divide meeting recordings into sections so it’s easy to find the content you would like to review. Personalized timeline and speaker markers help you navigate to the parts of a meeting recording most relevant to you.  

Intelligent recap supports several languages so more teams can collaborate naturally and get the corresponding AI-generated notes and AI-generated tasks afterward. Teams Premium also offers live translated meeting captions and transcripts during the meeting to further remove language barriers and simplify collaboration. 

The automated summaries provided by intelligent recap are a great first step on your generative AI journey with Copilot in Teams, which gives users the on-demand ability to ask any question about the meeting during and after, to deepen your insights and progress your next steps.  

Advanced protection to meet your organization’s unique needs 

Collaboration must be not only easy to conduct across multiple channels, it must also meet the business needs for security and control. From its launch, Teams Premium has helped customers work more securely with advanced protection and customized Teams management. Custom watermarking over screen shares and video feeds helps deter leaks of sensitive information and intellectual property. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) adds an additional layer of privacy in meetings so that only the participants can hear or see the communication. Turn off copying or forwarding of meeting chat, limiting who can record, and sensitivity labels help safeguard confidential information.  

A new category of Teams Premium capabilities that empowers IT admins with advanced controls to manage internal communications for sensitive accounts as well as deep insights into both application performance and external collaboration behaviors, to help ensure quality experiences and mitigate risks.  

Richer engagements for better business outcomes 

The core of effective collaboration is engagement. Teams Premium helps create deeper engagements with your customers and employees with personalized, branded experiences, to grow your business—from nurturing new clients in one-on-one virtual appointments to hosting webinars for prospects to delivering large-scale town halls.  

Infuse your brand into every stage of your interaction—from the meeting invitation, to the join page, and throughout the meeting. After your event, our recently launched engagement analytics help meeting and webinar organizers understand attendee interaction to drive the right level of follow-ups with attendees and improve outcomes for future engagements.  

Unlike other meeting and collaboration tools, Teams Premium brings these advanced capabilities and more together in one unified solution, reducing costs and making it simple to license and deploy. Get started for free for 30 days or buy before June 30, 2024, for just USD7 per user per month—30% off the standard USD10 pricing. 

We believe Gartner recognition is a result of the vision and effort of so many at Microsoft, but we also want to take a moment to thank our customers and partners for making this possible. Your feedback, ideas, and collaboration continually inspire us to raise the bar and shape Teams to better serve you. 

Learn more

If you’d like to learn more about Microsoft Teams Premium and how it can help your organization, give us a call at 410.543.8200. As one of the region’s top Microsoft 365 partners, we’re well positioned to help you deploy and optimize Teams and all other apps in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

If you’re looking to implement Microsoft 365 from scratch, Inacom offers FREE Microsoft 365 Email Migrations. You can buy Microsoft 365 from any number of Microsoft partners. Why not buy from the partner that’s willing to move you in for free?