#Is Teams Premium Worth It? I’ve had many conversations with customers around this exact topic. Teams Premium can be an awkward conversation to approach sometimes with customers that already spend so much on Microsoft licensing, I’ve had customers say things like “Oh no, there’s not another license is there?” or “No, we have E5 which includes EVERYTHING”. So, I’m going explain some of the key features included in the Microsoft Teams Premium license and you can make the decision if you think it’s worth the uplift for the added features.

#Direct Routing Troubleshooting tools coming to Teams Admin Center Rolling out in March 2025 is a brand-new feature to the Teams Admin Center that I think will be super useful to admins of their Microsoft Teams Phone deployment. This is the ability to review SIP Ladder diagrams directly in the Teams Admin Center. These reports will be available under the Usage Reports pages section of the Teams Admin Center and allow admins to view SIP requests, responses, and SDP data between the Microsoft Teams proxy and SBC the call was routed through.

#Direct Routing numbers available in the Teams Admin Center. Ever wanted to have access to your Direct Routing numbers directly in the Teams Admin Center? Well according to this Message Center message due Feb 2025 this feature will hit your tenants. With this release of the Direct Routing Inventory management, it’ll simplify how admins can control their Direct Routing numbers, previously this might have been a SharePoint list, Excel spreadsheet or nothing at all in some cases!

#Queues App – Monitor, Whisper, Barge, and Takeover! During the Queues App announcement one key feature that people were asking for was the ability to monitor, whisper, barge, and takeover on your agents calls. This was slated as being release after the General Availability of Queues App and according to the Microsoft Roadmap we should start to see this feature rolling out to tenants from March 2025. To use this feature, you will need to have the Queues App which requires the Teams Premium license.

#Voice enabled channels are here to stay! For now… Previously Microsoft announced that they would be retiring Voice Enabled Channels in June 2026. However, this has changed, it will no longer be retiring according to the message center 😊 Customers use Voice Enabled channels for a number of different reasons some of which are listed below: View which agents are opted into the Call Queue Opt yourself out of the queue Manage agent membership of a particular Call Queue Splitting out Call Queues between Teams to avoid confusion If you’re not using Voice Enabled channels, below is a screenshot of what they look like, and I would highly recommend you give them a go.