Category: licensing

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Microsoft buy Softomotive: RPA goodness ahead


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Microsoft have been big on driving the “low code/no code” movement through their Power Automate and Power Apps products for a while now. They coined (or at least popularised) the term “Citizen Developer” for people who aren’t “traditional” developers but are creating their own applications with these new tools and there is a growing community too.

April saw the introduction of new RPA (Robotic Process Automation) licensing for Microsoft 365 and Power Automate – which I looked at here. Now, Microsoft have announced the acquisition of Softomotive to boost the capabilities of Power Automate via their WinAutomation offering – which, if you have a Power Automate RPA attended license, is available at no extra cost.

RPA is definitely an area of increasing importance, driven by the impact of COVID-19 to a large degree, and certainly represents a big focus and growth area for Microsoft and its partners. It is also a whole new area for licensing confusion and disagreements so whatever your role, pay attention to the robots! 🤖

Further Reading

MS announcement

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Microsoft Product Terms – March 2020


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A pretty quiet March from Microsoft again – the main changes being:

VDA add-on for M365 E3/E5 added

Updated Windows 10 use rights for Microsoft 365 F1*. It can now use prior versions, access VDI, and use KMS activation.

Number of O365 licenses required for Multi-Geo Capabilities reduced from 500 to 250.

*It was called Microsoft F1 at the time but they have subsequently announced this product will be renamed to Microsoft 365 F3, and a new F1 will be introduced as well.

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Microsoft 365 changes in March


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Microsoft have announced a few big changes in March 2020 around:

Microsoft 365 F1 & F3 – a new SKU and a name change

Per-device licensing for Office 365 ProPlus

Name changes to certain Office 365 products

I’ve gone into detail on all 3 here – https://www.itassetmanagement.net/2020/03/31/microsoft-365-changes-march-2020/

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Per-device licensing for Office 365 Pro Plus


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Microsoft have finally announced per-device licensing of Office 365 Pro Plus* for commercial organisations – following its introduction to the education EES agreement last year. Coming, like a Hollywood blockbuster, in “summer 2020” – this is something that some organisations have been waiting on for a LONG time – particularly in verticals such as retail and manufacturing.

How to use it

As ever, there are conditions to its availability:

  • Only available as an add-on license
  • Only available via EA/EAS
  • Device must be Windows 10 – version 1803 or later
  • Office Pro Plus must be version 1907 or later
  • Device must be Azure Active Directory (AD) or hybrid AD joined

and there are various steps that need to be taken to enable it, including group policy changes.

I’ve long said that Microsoft would do this one day as a big portion of their customers wanted it and a sizeable chunk of potential cloud business was being blocked. If you’re a Microsoft customer who’s been holding out on moving to the cloud, expect a call from your friendly neighbourhood partner soon 😊

You can read further and get more details on the various technical pre-requisites here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/device-based-licensing

*As per this MS post here, Office 365 Pro Plus is now renamed “Microsoft 365 Apps” 🙄

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Microsoft Product Terms February 2020


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Another quiet month for Microsoft licensing , just a few minor changes.

A bunch more new Dynamics 365 SKUs including HR, Commerce, and IoT offerings.

Flow renamed to Power Automate.

Clarification on a few terms around Windows 7 ESU and Windows 10 QMTH (Qualified Multi Tenant Hosting).

It does make me think we’re going to see a number of changes all at once in an upcoming month…

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Microsoft PowerApps – no minimum licensing requirement?


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At their Inspire partner conference in July 2019, Microsoft announced a raft of licensing changes to Dynamics 365, PowerApps, and Power Automate (then Flow). Among the licensing rules covered in the sessions was a note that the PowerApps “Per App” option had a minimum license requirement of 30 licenses.

I noticed while perusing the subsequently published licensing guides that this minimum requirement wasn’t mentioned anywhere – which seems odd. Was it a change or an oversight I wondered aloud, and online? The PowerApps twitter account picked up my tweet and cam back to me with an answer very quickly:

https://twitter.com/MSPowerApps/status/1214603532944453632

So it seems there is no minimum. It’s not the greatest way to make this information known to us all though!

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Microsoft retire Dynamics 365 apps for LinkedIn


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Microsoft have announced that they’re retiring two Dynamics 365 apps, Talent Attract and Talent Onboard, with the LinkedIn Talent Hub being the preferred replacement.

The retirement date is February 1, 2022 and “eligible” customers can continue using the services until that date or the end of their most recent contract or renewal – whichever comes first. If you’re not currently using these apps but have a plan to do so – and still want to continue now Microsoft have announced they’re being phased out and no new capabilities will be added – there is an opt-in process to enable eligibility. You can raise a support ticket to become eligible to access the services until 2022 – that process must be completed by January 31, 2020.

Microsoft are rebranding their “core HR capabilities” from “Dynamics 365 Talent” to “Dynamics 365 Human Resources”, with current customers being transitioned to the new service automatically. This is all further change and flux within the Dynamics 365 family – it will be interesting to see if it calms down through 2020 at all.

Further Reading:

Microsoft Announcement – https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/bdm/2019/12/06/building-a-more-successful-workforce-with-dynamics-365-human-resources/

Microsoft Details – https://community.dynamics.com/365/talent/b/dynamics365fortalent/posts/retiring-dynamics-365-talent-attract-and-onboard-apps

LinkedIn Talent Hub – https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/talent-hub#

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Microsoft Product Terms – December 2019


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December 2019 sees the following additions:

Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (MDATP) for “cross-platform devices”. Available only via the EA/EAS volume licensing programmes, this allows MDATP to be run on up to 5 non-Windows devices concurrently.

Power Virtual Agents are added, with no extra info. These aim to enable anyone to create AI-powered chat bots and look to be a new member of the Power Platform:

From https://powervirtualagents.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-power-virtual-agents-is-now-generally-available/

There are a couple of lines added covering the recently announced Intune access for SCCM users. This confirms SA is required on the existing licenses but, perhaps a little confusingly, doesn’t mention the “Microsoft Endpoint Manager” name at all.

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Microsoft Project gets a refresh


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Microsoft are making changes to the “Project experience” to make it easier to use. They say this new Project is “designed to be both simple and powerful, so anyone can get started quickly and take control of any project right away”, with a more intuitive user interface – certainly something Project could do with in my opinion! Not surprisingly, there’s a fair amount of integration with Teams and Power BI.

As part of this, there are new/changed product names too. Project Online Professional is now Project Plan 3, while Project Online Premium is Project Plan 5. Added to the lineup is Project Plan 1 – an entry level SKU which doesn’t include many of the features nor a desktop client. It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, Plan 1 means for the future of Planner.

Project Plan 1 features – https://products.office.com/en-gb/project/compare-microsoft-project-management-software

You can see Microsoft’s announcement here, and check out the features and pricing for the Project Plans here.

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SQL Server 2019 Big Data Nodes


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The release of SQL Server 2019 sees the introduction of Big Data Nodes. This new family member aims to help organisations create data lakes, combining big data tools such as Hadoop with SQL Server – all supported by Microsoft.

To run a Big Data Node cluster, you first require a SQL Server Master Instance. This must be running SQL Server 2019 – Standard or Enterprise – with SA and licensed via the per core model.

The licenses on the Master Instance give an entitlement to a certain number of Big Data Node core licenses. For Standard edition it’s a 1:1 ratio, while for Enterprise it’s 1:8 – as an example, a server with 32 cores of SQL Server 2019 Standard w/SA would give rights to 32 cores of Big Data Node, while the same server licensed with Enterprise edition would allow 256 Big Data Node cores. Additional Big Data Node cores can be purchased separately.

The big data nodes can also be deployed in Azure using the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

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