Announced during Microsoft Inspire, August 1, 2020 will see a new add-on SKU for Microsoft Teams – “Advanced Communications”. Sitting as an add-on to any SKU that includes Teams it will give a range of features including:
Larger meetings
Customized lobbies
Compliance recording
although it seems not all features will be available immediately. It’s an interesting move…it seems quite a narrow set of features to put into a chargeable SKU – especially at $12 per user per month – so I’m keen to see how well this takes off. Perhaps it will be one of Microsoft’s semi-regular u-turns where they decide not to charge in the end?
Props to Matt Landis who spotted this first – he has more info on his blog too.
It’s just a few weeks into their new financial year and Microsoft are already making changes.
Perpetual software via CSP
Continuing their focus on the CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) program becoming the primary licensing model for the majority of organisations, Microsoft are now making perpetual software aka ‘software licenses’ available via CSP – although Software Assurance (SA) will not be available. This includes products such as:
Office Standard/Professional 2019
Exchange Server 2019
SharePoint Server 2019
The software must be run on hardware dedicated to the customer and downgrade rights are included.
Aimed primarily at those customers who purchase via Microsoft Open licensing, this new offering is intended to reduce the need for organisations to have CSP and another license agreement. From July 1, 2020, a select set of “indirect providers and their indirect resellers” will be able to transact these new additions and then it will open up to all CSP partners from January 2021.
E5 gets calling minutes
UPDATE AUGUST 1,2020: Microsoft have announced they’re cancelling the introduction of both the Enterprise Voice SKUs AND adding Calling Plans to E5.
Shoutout to Rob Quickenden for highlighting this change in Twitter.
Microsoft say in their updated post that they’re no longer launching ” due to rapidly evolving market conditions” and that they will “continue to assess the market and sales data to determine whether the launch will be rescheduled”.
This seems like a strange move. The additions made a lot of sense and have been well received by most people that have already heard about it! I wonder what Microsoft’s logic is?
August 1, 2020 will see the introduction of “Microsoft 365 Enterprise Voice” – a combination of:
Phone System
Audio Conferencing
Domestic Calling Plans
Which will be available in ‘Plan 1’ and ‘Plan 2’ flavours – ‘Plan 1’ will include 120 minutes of domestic outbound calling while the number of minutes in ‘Plan 2’ is still to be revealed.
These will be available via Enterprise Agreement (EA & EAS), CSP, and Web Direct for all countries where Calling Plans are currently available – except for the United States and Puerto Rico. License pre-requisites are M365 F3/E3 or O365 F3/E1/E3.
Additionally, 120 minutes of domestic outbound calling will be added to:
Microsoft 365 E5/A5
Office 365 E5/A5
At no additional cost – although it will require a new SKU.
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! 🤖
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.
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 😊
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:
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.
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:
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.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 