Microsoft have announced expanded Copilot for M365 access to a range of new SKUs including:
M365 F1/F3 Office 365 E1 M365 Business Basic
The Microsoft post says “and more” so we’ll have to wait for the full list to appear soon.
This change means that a huge additional number of Microsoft users will be able to buy it the new AI tool.
I have a couple of initial questions:
1) Why do this now?
I thought it would take a lot longer to get to this point. This feels like Microsoft are not selling Copilot for M365 anywhere near the rate they expected/want/need and so, to help recoup more of the enormous amount of money that must have been spent, they’re widening the pool quickly.
2) What about the price?
Are orgs really going to spend an additional $30 per user on top of these low cost SKUs? Particularly where the users will likely have fewer opportunities to benefit from Copilot’s assistance? I think perhaps we’re about to see a price drop or tiered pricing… I.e. Copilot for M365 Standard and Premium.
Microsoft have retired the “From SA” license offering starting from February 1, 2024 for Microsoft 365.
What are they?
Introduced in 2015, these licenses were Cloud USLs at a reduced price for customers who had on-premises licenses with active Software Assurance (SA) and aimed to make it less costly for them to move to Microsoft’s Online Services.
What’s changed?
Microsoft say that “Cloud services are now the predominant way customers use Microsoft products and services” and so these From SA SKUs are no longer needed.
Microsoft 365
Feb 1st 2024: You won’t be able to order additional or new From SA subscription licenses for Microsoft 365 and its standalone products. The impacted products are:
Core CAL Suite Bridge for Office 365 From SA
Enterprise CAL Bridge for Enterprise Mobility + Security From SA (User SL)
Enterprise CAL Suite Bridge for Office 365 From SA
Enterprise Mobility + Security E3/E5/G3/G5 From SA
Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise From SA
Microsoft 365 E3/E5/G3/G5 From SA
Microsoft Teams Phone Standard From SA
Office 365 E1/E3/E5/G1/G3/G5 From SA
Project Plan 1/3/5 From SA
Visio Online Plan 1 and 2 From SA
Windows 11 Enterprise E3/E5/G5 From SA
Office Professional Plus rights
There is now also wording that states any “licensed user” who used a device licensed with all 3 of:
Windows OS w/SA
Core/Enterprise CAL w/SA
Office Professional Plus w/SA
and has now been assigned a Microsoft 365 E3/E5 User SL can install a local copy of Office Professional Plus for the duration of the USL subscription.
This section from MS isn’t totally clear as to what it is saying/changing so questions/thoughts welcome. I think the phrase “transformed from SA” is new and is doing some of the work here…
Dynamics 365
April 1st 2024: You won’t be able to order additional or new From SA subscription licenses for Dynamics 365. The impacted products are:
Dynamics 365 Business Central Device From SA
Dynamics 365 Business Central Essentials From SA
Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium From SA
Dynamics 365 Business Central Team Members From SA
Dynamics 365 Commerce From SA
Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise From SA
Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise Device From SA
Dynamics 365 Customer Service Professional From SA
Dynamics 365 Human Resources From SA
Dynamics 365 Field Services From SA
Dynamics 365 Finance From SA
Dynamics 365 Operations – Activity From SA
Dynamics 365 Operations – Device From SA
Dynamics 365 Project Operations From SA
Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise From SA
Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise Device From SA
Dynamics 365 Sales Professional From SA
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management From SA
Dynamics 365 Team Members From SA
However, there will be a time limited “promotional migration offer” being made available to EA customers by April 1st to help customers migrate.
Any licenses purchased before the change date can continue to be renewed but quantities can’t be increased.
You can see the Microsoft announcement here. Interestingly, it’s dated December 15th but it hasn’t been publicised until today – or at least I didn’t see it!
The October Microsoft Product Terms introduced a new SKU “Microsoft Defender for IoT – EIoT Device License – add-on“.
This add-on license will enable “real-time device discovery, continuous monitoring, and vulnerability management capabilities for eIoT devices licensed per device“.
Although it appeared this month (October), Microsoft have now stated it won’t actually be available until November 1st due to “a slight delay”.
Availability
The Product Terms list the pre-requisite licenses as:
Microsoft 365 A5/E5
Microsoft 365 A5/E5/F5 Security
Microsoft 365 F5 Security and Compliance
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint P2
Windows 10/11 Enterprise A5/E5
This capability will also be included within Microsoft 365 E5 and E5 Security from November 1st.
Hang on…
If it’s included in M365 E5/Security, why would you purchase the add-on for those licenses? That’s a good question and there is an answer:
Each M365 E5/Security license allows you to cover up to 5 IoT devices so, if you have more IoT devices than M365/Security USLs x 5, you can buy add-on licenses to cover the rest.
Definitions
IoT = Internet of Things
EIoT = Enterprise Internet of Things <–This appears to mean, to Microsoft, devices being used “in the context of business operations“
Name changes were the name of the game this month:
Microsoft Viva Sales has its named changed to “Microsoft Sales Copilot” Dynamics 365 Marketing = “Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys” Dynamics 365 Customer Insights = “Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data” Sold together as “Dynamics 365 Customer Insights” 🙄
I posted at the end of July about the new EU probe into Microsoft’s practice of bundling Teams with Office 365 and now, just four or so weeks later, Microsoft have announced a significant change for customers in the EEA (European Economic Area) and Switzerland.
Microsoft state these changes have 2 aims:
To enable organisations to buy Office/Microsoft 365 without Teams – and pay less
To improve interoperation between rival communication/collaboration products
Licensing changes
From October 1st, 2023 the “Teams Included” Enterprise O/M 365 suites in the EEA and Switzerland will be discontinued. This means the suites will still be available, just without Teams included, and they will be €2 per user per month cheaper.
Net new customers will need to buy 2 separate SKUs: the EEA O/M365 SKU and the separate Teams SKU…which will cost €5 per user per month.
Existing customers can choose to stay with the Teams inclusive suite and renew/add seats or choose to switch to the new offering at anniversary/renewal.
The old and new F SKUs and Business SKUs will co-exist, meaning organisations can choose to buy the with or without Teams licenses.
Interoperability changes
Microsoft will provide additional information and resources around APIs and extensibility to 3rd party providers and ISVs. They will also “develop a new method for hosting the Office web applications within competing apps and services much like Microsoft accomplishes in Teams“
Microsoft links
You can see the full announcement here and more licensing details here.
Microsoft’s latest AI product Copilot, which promises to be a real game changer when it comes to applying Generative AI to business, now has pricing available.
It will cost $30 per user per month and, as we saw recently, will be an add-on license to Microsoft 365 E3/E5/Business Std/Business Premium.
That’s higher than I was expecting; I thought they’d go lower to ensure as many people as possible got on-board. I know there stand to be some really great time savings and productivity increases but an additional $360,000 per year for an organisation licensing 1,000 users seems quite steep.
Of course, many organisations won’t pay that price in reality with volume discounts on EA, negotiated discounts etc. but it will still represent a large investment for many.
Bing Enterprise Chat
This has also been announced – a way to give employees a more powerful way of searching without risking data leakage. Microsoft state:
“Chat data is not saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access – which means no one can view your data. And, your data is not used to train the models.”
This is included in Microsoft 365 E3/E5/Business Std/Business Premium free of charge and you can access Bing Chat Enterprise using your work account wherever Bing Chat is supported — Bing.com/chat and the Microsoft Edge sidebar. It will eventually be available as a standalone offering for $5 per user per month.
Microsoft Build 2023 saw the announcement of Microsoft Fabric – “an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need” by combining various products including Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory.
Additionally, “Fabric comes with a SaaS, multi-cloud data lake called OneLake that is built-in and automatically available to every Fabric tenant. All Fabric workloads are automatically wired into OneLake, just like all Microsoft 365 applications are wired into OneDrive. “
To get more info about what Fabric is, check out the MS post here. To learn more about the licensing and pricing, read on 😊
Microsoft Fabric licensing
Microsoft Fabric takes its licensing model, and some of its terminology, from Power BI Premium which means parts of this may be familiar to you.
Each organisation must have 1 x “organisational” license and at least 1 x “individual” license and each subscription is broken down into tenants, capacities, and workspaces.
Organisational licenses
These provide the infrastructure for Microsoft Fabric – effectively this is what gets things provisioned in Azure so you have something to access/work with. There are 2 types which follow the Power BI Premium pattern:
Capacity – This provisions a set of resources in Azure with different SKUS providing different amounts of capacity, cores, RAM etc.
Premium Per User – Gives per-user access to Power BI elements on Microsoft Fabric, with shared capacity only.
Capacity SKUs
SKU
Capacity Units
PAYG (Hourly)
PAYG (Monthly)
Power BI SKUs
Power BI v-cores
F2*
2
$0.36
$262.80
N/A
0.25
F4*
4
$0.72
$525.60
N/A
0.5
F8*
8
$1.44
$1,051.20
EM1/A1
1
F16*
16
$2.88
$2,102.40
EM2/A2
2
F32*
32
$5.76
$4,204.80
EM3/A3
4
F64
64
$11.52
$8,409.60
P1/A4
8
F128
128
$23.04
$16,819.20
P2/A5
16
F256
256
$46.08
$33,638.40
P3/A6
32
F512
512
$92.16
$67,276.80
P4/A7
64
F1024
1024
$184.32
$134,553.60
P5/A8
128
F2048
2048
$368.64
$269,107.20
N/A
256
Pricing of Fabric capacity SKUs at US west 2
*SKUs smaller than F64 require all users, including those consuming content, to be licensed with a Power BI Pro license.
The Azure “F” SKUs are billed PAYG per second
The P SKUs are billed monthly/annually with a monthly commitment and support Fabric being enabled on top of the Power BI subscription.
The EM SKUs do not support Fabric.
Individual licenses
Free – This allows users with access to Fabric capacity to create and share Fabric content
Pro – Required to create, share, and in some cases consume, Power BI content
This appears to show a differentiation between “Fabric content” and “Power BI content” – even if the Power BI content is being created within Fabric 🤔
Pricing and costs
As well as the SKU pricing above, there will also be additional costs for OneLake storage. Again based on costs in US West, the price is:
$0.023 per GB per month
That equals $23 per TB per month ($276 annually). 500TB of data in Fabric OneLake will be $138,000 per year and I feel like that’s probably a low amount of data for many organisations.
There are also potential bandwidth costs as data is accessed and moved between regions:
Managing these resources and costs can be done through a combination of the Fabric portal and Azure Cost Management:
Furthermore, Azure Reservations (Reserved Instances) are planned for later in 2023 which will make the Fabric capacity pricing comparable to the Power BI capacity pricing.
While we’re still awaiting the full release, which could be July 1st or perhaps during Microsoft Inspire later that month, we do have more information available.
Eligible base licenses are:
Microsoft 365 E3 Microsoft 365 E5 Microsoft 365 Business Standard Microsoft 365 Business Premium
And users need to have an Azure AD account too. This is a clear indication that Copilot will be an extra add-on license.
Furthermore, their M365 Apps must be on “Current Channel” or the “Monthly Enterprise Channel” to access Co-pilot.
I haven’t seen any indication of pricing yet but I’m thinking perhaps £10 for E3 and £5 for E5? With some promos at first of course.
*Update* It turns out I was way off base! Microsoft have confirmed the price is $30 per user per month. More info and examples here.
It’s the Microsoft Product Terms updates for April 2023 and, to paraphrase Puff Daddy and the Bad Boy Family…it’s all about Windows Server baby!
Some key changes that help to harmonise licensing across different platforms, which is a benefit for all of us involved!
Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server changes:
No longer need to allocate 16 licenses as a minimum No longer have to assign stacked licenses in groups of 8 Confirms minimum of 8 core licenses for AHB VM
Licensing Win Svr by individual virtual OSE:
No longer need to allocate 16 licenses as a minimum CSP customers with Standard licenses can use Datacenter images as guests when licensing by virtual OSE – but must follow Standard edition use rights
CSP-Hoster:
Customers do not need Windows Server CALs or External Connector licenses when accessing “server software acquired from, fulfilled, and hosted by a Cloud Solution Provider-Hoster”.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 