Microsoft Product Terms, April 2020

This month’s Product Terms has got a few cool additions – one in particular!

Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection for Servers

This was previously only available via an Azure Security Center subscription but can now be obtained via EA/EAS and CSP. It covers Windows Server 2008 R2/2012R2/2016/2019.

In order to purchase MDATP for Servers, organisations must have a combined minimum of 50 licenses of:

• Microsoft Defender ATP

• Windows E5/A5

• Microsoft 365 E5/A5

• Microsoft 365 E5 Security

Interestingly, if ATP for Servers customers decide to migrate to using Azure Security Center (ASC) on those same servers, active ATP for Server licenses will be credited against the ASC price.

New Microsoft 365 SKUs

April 2020 sees the introduction of:

• E5 eDiscovery & Audit

• E5 Information Protection & Governance

• E5 Insider Risk management

Prerequisites

For eDiscovery & Audit and Insider Risk Management, the license prerequisites are:

• Microsoft 365 (any)
• Office 365 (any)
• Exchange Online
• SharePoint Online
• OneDrive for Business

For Information Protection & Governance, the prerequisite licenses are:

• Microsoft 365 (any)
• Office 365 (any)
• Exchange Online
• SharePoint Online
• OneDrive for Business
• Azure Information Protection
• EMS E3/A3

Office / Microsoft 365 F1 & F3

Microsoft have renamed the old F1 licenses to F3, and introduced a new F1 SKU to sit underneath, with limited capabilities as it only includes EMS E3 and “limited” Office services. The F1 license is pretty much just Teams really – no email, no Onedrive etc.

Microsoft licensing for Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

I’ve saved the best ’til last here – in my opinion at least! RPA is a growing area of business – the idea of using bots, rather than humans, to perform repetitive tasks to increase efficiency and, when used properly, job satisfaction. However, it’s also a licensing minefield – and Microsoft have been very quiet on this subject…until now! Well, actually, they’re still being quiet because these new additions were just slipped into the April Product Terms without any other mention – it strikes me as odd because these new licenses could herald a pretty significant change.

What have they added?

The Product Terms now contains:

• Microsoft 365 E3/A3 – Unattended license
• Power Automate per user with attended RPA plan
• Power Automate unattended RPA add-on

There’s not a huge amount of extra info in the Product Terms but it does say that the E3/A3 unattended license includes Office 365 E3/A3, Windows 10 E3/A3, and EMS E3/A3 – no mention of them being restricted or limited at all.

Some definitions

The OST (Online Service Terms) gives more information. Microsoft’s definition of RPA is:

“An application (or set of applications) used to capture data and manipulate applications to perform repetitive tasks. Bots operate upon any UI element of Windows 10 within an OSE and/or operates upon any Office application in any OSE.”

Attended bot = This is a bot that “assists a person to execute automation on the person’s local and/or remote workstations.” They go on to say that “it operates concurrently with the person on the same workstation/s to accomplish repetitive tasks and is triggered by explicit actions of that person“.

In this scenario, it sounds like you would assign a regular M365 license to both the user and the bot?

Unattended bot = “Any bot that doesn’t strictly conform to the definition of an attended bot“.

The Power Automate unattended RPA add-on can be added onto the Power Automate per user with attended RPA plan and Power Automate per flow plan.