Microsoft Enterprise Agreement: Updated for the Cloud

Microsoft’s top level licensing model, the Enterprise Agreement, has recently been overhauled to make it more cloud friendly…which is a good thing for organisations looking to adopt this new model now, or in the future.

What is an Enterprise Agreement?

The Enterprise Agreement (EA) is Microsoft’s highest level model, for companies of 250 seats and above. It requires an Enterprise Wide (EW) licensing commitment, includes Software Assurance (SA) on all licences and offers the best discounts.

The common way for an organization to licence under the EA is with the “Professional Desktop”, comprised of:

Windows OS
Office Pro Plus
Core CAL

The Core CAL itself is a bundle, comprised of:

Windows Server CAL
Exchange Server CAL
Sharepoint Server CAL
SCCM Client ML

With the exception of Windows Server & SCCM, all these products are now available online via Office 365 and Intune.

If a company with an existing EA wanted to take advantage of these products, they would be on top of their existing Professional Desktop licences, as they are required to maintain the Enterprise Wide commitment. This would mean double licensing, not an effective use of budget and of course, not the way customers want to do things.

So in a very quick move, Microsoft have produced an amendment to their Enterprise Agreement terms making it possible for organizations to “mix & match” between online & onsite licensing.

Product LineUp

Windows OS –> Windows Intune

Office –> Office 365 E3 or E4

Core CAL –> Core Bridge

Enterprise CAL –> ECAL Bridge

What’s a Bridge CAL?

Bridge CALs are a new licensing item that bridge the gap between the CAL suites and their closest online relatives.

For the Core CAL offering, the bridge CAL covers the organization for:

Windows Server CALs
SCCM Client MLs

thus completing the Enterprise Wide commitment, without duplicating any functionality and keeping them compliant with the contract terms.

Example

The following diagram gives a good example of how the online and onsite licensing models can co-exist within an organization.

There are certain differences when it comes to the Software Assurance benefits available with Online products too, for example:

Windows Intune does NOT give

Training Vouchers
TechNet Subscriptions

There are a variety of different combinations possible when it comes to these licensing scenarios, some more complex than others! I have left out a fair amount of information from this post as I don’t want to cause confusion, however if you have a specific scenario I would be more than happy to help Smile

It’s great to see Microsoft making such changes as this and at such a good speed. Many people criticised Microsoft for taking too long to update their licensing models to accommodate the changes brought about by Virtualisation and, while that may be true, Redmond are definitely ahead of the curve this time!

April 15, 2011

Microsoft Cloud Mobility Licensing Changes

Microsoft are making a big push with their hosted application offerings (BPOS & Office 365) but are also aware that many customers and partners base their businesses on 3rd party hosted solutions. In an effort to make that easier and more cost effective, the Redmond based company recently announced some changes to their licensing rule, referred to as “Licence Mobility”.

Essentially, these changes will allow customer organizations to deploy their licences in-house or hosted in a 3rd party datacenter. Not all products are covered with these changes, in fact, here are the products that are:

SQL Server
Exchange Server
Sharepoint Server
Lync Server
System Center Servers (note the plural – this seems to be any and all SC products)
Dynamics CRM

If these products are licensed with Software Assurance they

“can be run in service providers’ datacenters on shared hardware for that customer’s dedicated use”

Products that are NOT included are:

Windows Server Operating Systems
Windows Client Operating Systems
Desktop Applications
Developer Tools

Other Changes

Also, Microsoft are expanding the Subscriber Access Licences (SALs) for SA SKUs to cover Enterprise licences for

Exchange
Lync
Sharepoint

For more information, see here:

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/about-licensing/value-of-volume-licensing.aspx#tab=4

March 28, 2011

Microsoft Office 365, Sharepoint Online and Mail Enabled Lists

Microsoft Sharepoint does so many things that there are 100’s of features used by only a subset of companies, but there are a number of features that are pretty key to the majority of Sharepoint organizations. To me, one of these is:

Mail Enabled Lists

Basically, this allows you to send emails to a list within Sharepoint and have it catalogue the mail and also store any attachments to that mail; I think that’s pretty cool!

This feature wasn’t available in BPOS and I discovered today it won’t be available in the soon to be released Office 365 either. I couldn’t really understand why as, on the face of it, mail enabled lists appear to be quite an easy feature to enable. I asked one of the Microsoft TSP’s today and also did a little Bing based research and have come up with something of an answer.

The official answer from Microsoft Corp. is:

“They are currently disabled due to performance, scalability, policy enforcement, data requirements and legal compliance issues that can affect Enterprise customers”

Looking into it further, I came across a post on Joel Oleson’s MSDN based blog on the subject of Mail Enabled lists which throws some more light onto the subject. He says:

“MS IT has been very cautious about their support for email enabled lists and specifically only supporting it on few isolated environments”

which I found very surprising. Luckily he goes on to answer my question – Why?

“Email enabled lists create contact objects in AD, it takes careful coordination to create these contact objects and ensure the proper write access to a specific OU. Imagine 500,000 lists all with the ability to be email enabled”

BPOS/Office 365 is a multi tenant setup, meaning there could be millions of lists in the cloud based Active Directory, many of which could have 1000’s of updates a day. That is quickly a huge overhead for the servers and infrastructure to cope with, potentially leading to a negative impact on the service Microsoft offer to their customers.

Hopefully in the future, Microsoft will enable this feature…perhaps with a maximum limit per company for number of lists/number of daily updates etc. However there is no word floating around the halls of any such move for the foreseeable future…

What are your thoughts – are mail enabled lists important to you? Would it stop you from moving to the cloud? Let me know in the comments Smile

March 28, 2011

Microsoft Exchange Online & Blackberry

Microsoft BPOS, the online versions of Exchange, Sharepoint et al has offered a Hosted Blackberry service for around 12 months now and it’s been pretty popular. The vast majority of organizations that use Exchange also use RIM’s Blackberry’s so offering them a way to push that off to the cloud certainly made the adoption of Exchange Online an even easier deal to sell. It was a pretty cost effective solution too, at £6/$10 per user per month.

As BPOS is soon transitioning to Office 365, with new versions of the MS software available in the cloud, there is also a change happening to the Blackberry service…well actually two changes.

1) The service will move over to be hosted, managed & supported by RIM.

2) The monthly cost is changing to £0/$0

That’s right, the service is going to become a free value add from Microsoft and not only that, it will be better than the current offering! From an email Microsoft sent to customers and partners this morning:

“administrators will be able to create and manage more device policies, change device passwords and settings, and search across large numbers of BlackBerry users at one time.”

The monthly cost is also changing for current customers right now, enabling them to take advantage of the zero cost straight away. This is a significant cost saving for companies, as an example – an organization with 150 Blackberry users would look like this:

£6 x 12 months x 150 users = £10,800 per annum

This move from Microsoft instantly saves almost £11,000 a year in the example above, and 150 BB users isn’t a particularly large installation either. Companies could/should use that money to invest in other areas of infrastructure…they could add Sharepoint Online for those users and still have nearly a 50% saving!

Current Customers

Current Blackberry Online subscriptions are being terminated on June 30, 2011 so if you’re currently using the Blackberry Online Service, there are steps that must be taken to ensure continuous service.

Log in to Microsoft Online: Go to the Microsoft Online Customer Portal and log into your Microsoft Online account.
Locate the Hosted BlackBerry service offer: Click Manage Subscription, choose an active BPOS or Exchange Online subscription*, select Buy Hosted BlackBerry from the Actions dropdown, and click Go.
* This can be the same BPOS or Exchange Online subscription with which Hosted Blackberry was last purchased.
Checkout: In the Shopping Cart, enter your total required number of Hosted BlackBerry seats** and accept the Hosted Blackberry Service Terms of Use (checkbox). Click Update, then click Checkout. The new $0/user/month pricing for all of your current seats for the Hosted BlackBerry service takes effect at new agreement signature. All users under the old terms of use are now covered by the new terms of use regardless of the user count entered.
** At a minimum, customers should enter the number of Hosted BlackBerry licenses in use today across all existing Hosted BlackBerry subscriptions. This number is visible in the Hosted BlackBerry Administration Console which is a part of the Microsoft Online Administration Portal.
Cancel the old subscription(s): To cancel your previous subscriptions and avoid being billed for the Hosted BlackBerry service as of your next billing cycle, you must cancel any previously existing subscriptions through a Service Request, either by phone or through the service request form in your Microsoft Online Administration Console (MOAC). Service use will continue uninterrupted after cancelling the old subscriptions.

Bad News

The good news is that organizations can save £1000’s per year but there is some bad news. Unfortunately, RIM aren’t going to have the new platform ready for the General Availability (GA) of Microsoft Office 365; it will be “beginning in late 2011” according to Microsoft.

We’ve been told that companies on Office 365 will be unable to use Hosted Blackberry until the RIM platform is complete, so perhaps some 6 months after Office 365 becomes available. I am yet to get 100% clarification on this point but it appears this means that existing BPOS & Hosted Blackberry users must choose:

Stay on the BPOS platform with Hosted Blackberry for a further 6 months

Move to the new Office 365 platform and lose Hosted Blackberry for around 6 months

Not an ideal situation for anyone so I am looking to get more clarification around this ASAP and will update here. My hope is that although they are terminating subscriptions, Microsoft will keep their platform running for existing customers until such time that RIM get their act together…

March 7, 2011

Lync Online & VoIP

Microsoft are readying Office 365, the new version of their Online Services offering, to be released within the next 3-4 months and one of the new features over it’s previous iteration, BPOS, is the inclusion of VoIP (Voice over IP) Audio.

However, due to certain licensing restrictions, it isn’t currently available in all countries that can use the Office 365 service. Below is a table showing the current standing for VOIP availability across the range of countries who have the beta.

I assume this is down to specific country laws as to what services you can provide before you’re classed as a Telecommunications Provider…surely an area MS don’t want to get into!

I have to say I’m surprised it will be available in the UK Smile

October 19, 2010

Microsoft Office 365 & BPOS

Microsoft made a big announcement today – Office is available online!

Yes Office Web Apps have been with us for a little while but they are lacking many features and, in the corporate world, you need a full Office licence on your desktop to use them. This however is “proper” online Office so, just like the original BPOS offerings such as Exchange & Sharepoint, it exists solely in the cloud…no on premise(s) software required.

There were also name changes, new products and new prices announced today so let’s take a look at the whole shebang!

Office 365

This is the new name for Microsoft’s cloud services, both existing and new. Family members include:

Office 365 Small Business

Office 365 for Enterprise (BPOS V2)

BPOS Government

Live@EDU

To be honest, I’m not really sure about the name. Maybe it will grow on me but for now at least, it feels a bit cheap and I’ve already seen people asking what happens on day 366 of a leap year Smile

Office 365 Small Business

This cut down version of Microsoft’s cloud offerings is, as the name suggests, aimed at small businesses with up to 25 users and offers:

Exchange Online
Sharepoint Online
Lync Online
Office Web Apps
External Web Site

for $6 per user per month.

Office 365 for Enterprise

BPOS V2 aka Union will be available in the first half of 2011, as per Mary Jo Foley’s info.

This will give companies:

Office Professional Plus
Exchange Online
Sharepoint Online
Lync Online
24×7 Phone Support
On Premise(s) licences

It’s to be noted that the upcoming Wave 14 releases of the online products will introduce dozens of new features that make them much more compelling to businesses, such as the ability to federate Lync and host extranets on Sharepoint:

Read Microsoft BPOS- More new features

All this will cost just $24 per user per month – that is really amazing!

Availability

Beta testing across 13 countries has started, with beta sign up available at:

http://www.office365.com

If you can get it to load up for you – I’m having no luck!

Office365 will be available in 40 countries during 2011. It will then expand to include Dynamics CRM 2011 Online (a great product) and then a separate Educational focused offering will arrive, rolling into it Live@EDU.

Follow @Office365 for more info.

I’m already thinking of a number of our clients who will be very interested in Office Online but one question I have already been asked is:

“Can I get Office Online as a separate product?”

I don’t think so but I will check…

August 16, 2010

Microsoft Windows Intune: Online Systems Management

Microsoft Windows InTune is the new Cloud based systems management tool from Microsoft, formerly known as “System Center Online” and has been long awaited. The ability to manage multiple locations/organizations from one central, online point is attractive to a lot of people for a lot of reasons…so let’s take a look @ InTune.

There are at least 10 sections inside InTune so I’m going to cover them in a number of posts, we’ll start with – System Overview:

This is the first screen you see when you log in to the Windows InTune Admin Console and it immediately gives you a great overview of yours systems. It shows:

If Machines are infected/unprotected
If there are updates for your machines
A number of other alerts

Malware Protection:

From here you can see which machines have Malware protection turned off completely and also if they have overdue scans or specific parts of the protection, such as USB device scanning, turned off.

1 click takes you to a list of machines, from where you can turn on protection.

Updates:

This, not surprisingly, gives you a list of all the updates that are available for you machines be they for the OS or applications.

One issue with this is that, as default, it shows you ALL possible updates:

however, these can easily be filtered:

Another problem I have noticed is that it wants to give my laptop updates for Office 2007, as well as Office 2010; oddly, this doesn’t happen with my other 2010 machines. I had a number of issues when upgrading Office versions and I’m inclined to believe that there are some Office 2007 remnants on the machine that are being picked up by Intune.

Should you choose to approve an update for a machine/machines, you then reach this screen:

Choose the groups on which you want to install the updates, click approve and job done!

I feel it would be a smoother experience and require less clicks, if you could see the machine names on the same screen as all the updates. Currently, you must:

Select the update
click on “x computers need this update”
Check the groups/machines
Go back to the previous screen
Approve Update

Showing the machines names/groups on the initial screen would remove a lot of that.

You can also access the updates via the individual machine screen, I’ll cover that in a later post.

Alerts by Type:

This section, as well as the above, also includes other types of alerts…not just updates and malware. This is where InTune starts to differentiate itself from other products, for example:

If I click through, it tell me:

That is pretty cool, and something that is very useful for System Admins. I didn’t expect InTune to cover things like this, certainly not in the beta, so I’m pleasantly surprised Smile However, you can’t initiate the defrag from InTune.

The 2 options on the right hand side “Create Computer Group” and “View a Report” will be covered in later posts.

Summary:

This is a brief look at just the first screen of Microsoft Windows InTune but I’m sure you will agree that it already looks very interesting. So stay tuned for the remaining posts in this series (at least 9!) and ask any questions you may have in the comments Smile

Cheers

Rich

July 13, 2010

Microsoft BPOS Wave 14: Client Support

BPOS, Microsoft’s Online Services offering, obviously plugs in to their Office suites but there are restrictions about which versions you can use. Currently Office 2003/2007 & 2010 are all supported but, once the new online release happens, that will change.

Based on current rules, partners are expecting Office 2003 support to end by early 2011 but, based on the MS Online Service post here, that may not be the case:

“We are currently investigating Office 2003 support and will publish a list of supported capabilities in the future”

which indicates at least some functionality will still be available to organizations running Office 2003. There are a HUGE number of reasons why upgrading to 2010 is a great idea, but that’s for another time 🙂

The full list of supported products is:

Operating Systems:

Windows XP SP3 with RPC over HTTP patch

Windows Vista SP2

Windows 7

OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

10.5 (Leopard)

10.6 (Snow Leopard)

*Windows XP Home and Windows Media Center edition are supported but will not support federated identity.

Office Client:

Office 2007 SP2 or Office 2010

Office 2008 for Mac & Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition

.NET 2.0 or later

Microsoft Communicator “14”

Mac Messenger 9

*Office client is not required for customers who choose browser-only access. Office Communicator ‘14’ will be generally available later this year.

Browser:

Administration Center and My Company Portal

Internet Explorer 8 for Windows XP
Internet Explorer 7 or higher for Windows Vista and Windows 7
Firefox 3.x
Safari 4.x

Outlook Web App

Internet Explorer 7 or later
Firefox 3 or later
Safari 3 or later on Macintosh OS X 10.5
Chrome 3 or later

Outlook Web App Light

Internet Explorer 5.5 or later
Firefox 2 or later
Safari 3 or later
Opera

The news that Office 2003 won’t be killed off completely is good news, as it allows partners to position BPOS separately to Office upgrades…and allows customers to keep the costs apart!

July 13, 2010July 14, 2010

Microsoft BPOS: More new features

Microsoft BPOS has, yet again, been something of a star of the Worldwide Partner Conference and a bunch of new features have been confirmed/announced. They are:

Exchange Online:

Voice mail with Unified Messaging

Integrated archiving

Retention policies and legal hold

Transport rules

Multi-mailbox search

Conversation View

MailTips

Enhanced Web-based administration

Role-Based Access Control

Remote PowerShell

Free/busy between cloud and on-premises

Cross-premises management

Native migration tools

Sharepoint Online:

Portal site templates

Extranet access

Anonymous Access

Multi-Lingual UI

Office 2010 integration

Tagging, Rating, Tag Cloud

Activity Feed, Social Networking, Note Board

Improved Wikis & Blogs

Content publishing

Navigation controls

Cross site-collection search

Phonetic search

People search

Visio Services

Excel Services

Sandboxed Solutions

Improved workflows

Improved SharePoint Designer 2010

Access Services

Better controls of FQDNs

Office Communications Online:

P2P A/V across firewall

File transfer across firewall

Presence with pictures

Federation

IM with Windows Live

Platform Updates:

Free/Busy co-existence

Single Sign On

Identity federation

Redesigned admin interface

More administration and access control

There are some really awesome additions here, which will make BPOS hugely more attractive and credible to users in the mid-market segment. Some of the game changes are, in my opinion,:

Exchange Online:

Transport Rules
Legal Hold
Unified Messaging
Remote Powershell

Sharepoint Online:

Extranet & Anonymous Access

Cross Site Collection Search

Visio, Access & Excel Services

Office Communications Online:

Federation.

These new features bring Microsoft’s Online Services so much closer to feature parity with their existing on-premise brethren which is what I, and most people, have been waiting/asking/pleading/clamouring for. The number of times I’ve had a customer opportunity collapse due to BPOS missing a standard and relatively basic feature isn’t funny!

This is a very positive move from Microsoft which will make the world of Online Services a much better place for Microsoft, it’s partners and our customers 🙂

July 13, 2010

Microsoft BPOS July Service Update

Microsoft’s BPOS updates usually bring great features and July 2010 is no different:

Hosted Blackberry Admin Centre:

While Microsoft have offered Blackberry hosting for a while, most of the admin features required you to raise a ticket with support. Now however you will be able to:

Add/Delete users from licences
Activate Devices
Perform Remote Wipes

all through the portal. This makes Microsoft’s Blackberry offering much more attractive.

You will also be able to increase your number of Blackberry licences via the portal, removing the need for paper orders. Decreasing now just requires a support request.

Live Meeting LifeCycle:

The Live Meeting client will now be supported for 18 months from release, and there are quarterly releases of the (free) client.

There is also a new version of the Live Meeting Outlook Add-in which goes about:

Improving the ability for users to respond to access control prompts when sharing control for Application Sharing.
Retaining the scheduled meeting on the Office Live Meeting service when an attendee has been removed from an invitation created by the Outlook Add-in.
Displaying invitees’ tracked responses for recurring meeting series that were converted to Office Live Meeting via the Add-in.

The Microsoft Online Services Blog is here:

Service Update- July 2010 Release Availability, Features Announced

What is an Enterprise Agreement?

Product LineUp

What’s a Bridge CAL?

Example

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Other Changes

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Current Customers

Bad News

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Office 365

Office 365 Small Business

Office 365 for Enterprise

Availability

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Malware Protection:

Updates:

Alerts by Type:

Summary:

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Exchange Online:

Sharepoint Online:

Office Communications Online:

Platform Updates:

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