Category: Microsoft 365

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Microsoft 365 Backup and Archive


Microsoft Inspire 2023 saw the announcement of two services that have been long awaited:

  • Microsoft 365 Backup
  • Microsoft 365 Archive

While 3rd-parties such as AvePoint, Veritas, Veeam, and SkyKick have offerings, many customers have wanted a native Microsoft product.

Microsoft 365 Backup

This provides protection and restore for:

  • OneDrive
  • SharePoint
  • Exchange

and keeps all data within the Microsoft 365 security boundary. You will be able to:

  • Backup all or select SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Exchange mailboxes in your tenant.
  • Restore files, sites, and mailbox items in your tenant in parallel to a prior point-in-time in a granular manner or at massive scale.
  • Search or filter content in your backups using key metadata such as item or site names, owners, or event types within specific restore point date ranges.

It will be accessed via the M365 Admin Center.

Microsoft 365 Archive

This will provide a cold storage tier within SharePoint for old/inactive data at a “cost effective price”. This will allow you to:

  • Select and archive or reactivate full sites in place without needing to migrate your data outside of Microsoft. File level archiving will be coming in the second half of 2024.
  • Maintain full admin-level search, eDiscovery, access policy, sensitivity label, DLP (Data Loss Prevention), retention policy, access control settings, and other security and compliance functionality.

Site-level archiving will be the only option at first until file-level archiving arrives mid-2024.

Overview

Sensibly, Microsoft have made APIs available for both services so partners (such as those mentioned above) can make use of this functionality too. Both of these new services are powered by Microsoft Syntex, a set of tools/products that is yet to truly find its place but is clearly becoming utilised more by Redmond.

You can see more info here and sign up for the previews of these products here.

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Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing


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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.

See the announcement from Microsoft here.

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Microsoft Fabric licensing & pricing


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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

SKUCapacity UnitsPAYG (Hourly)PAYG (Monthly)Power BI SKUsPower BI v-cores
F2*2$0.36$262.80N/A0.25
F4*4$0.72$525.60N/A0.5
F8*8$1.44$1,051.20EM1/A11
F16*16$2.88$2,102.40EM2/A22
F32*32$5.76$4,204.80EM3/A34
F6464$11.52$8,409.60P1/A48
F128128$23.04$16,819.20P2/A516
F256256$46.08$33,638.40P3/A632
F512512$92.16$67,276.80P4/A764
F10241024$184.32$134,553.60P5/A8128
F20482048$368.64$269,107.20N/A256
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.

Microsoft resources

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/enterprise/licenses

https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-microsoft-fabric-capacities-are-available-for-purchase

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Microsoft Copilot licensing details


Microsoft Copilot licensing details are here!

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.

See the MS post here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-copilot/how-to-prepare-for-microsoft-365-copilot/ba-p/3851566

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Microsoft Product Terms: May 2023


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Not much happening in May, this month we saw:

  • Windows To Go terms removed
  • Microsoft Managed Desktop added to the Microsoft 365 Cross-tenant User Data Migration License Prerequisites list
  • OpenAI and Azure Machine learning added to the “Azure Core Services” list and Viva Insights added to the “Microsoft 365 Core Services” list

Products in the Core Services lists will store data at rest in the same geo as the service is deployed, part of Microsoft’s data privacy practices.

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Microsoft Windows 365 Frontline


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Windows 365 Frontline is a new licensing option for Microsoft’s Cloud PC offering, aimed at “Frontline” workers who don’t need constant access to their own PC. This can be scenarios such as:

  • Staff on rota
  • Staff across timezones
  • Part-time staff

Licensing

Each W365 Frontline license allows 3 Cloud PCs virtual machines to be provisioned, but they cannot be used concurrently. The maximum active number of Frontline VMs allowed is equal to the number of licenses you’ve purchased i.e. you’ve bought 20 licenses which enables 60 VMs…but only 20 can be in use at any one time.

W365 Frontline introduces the concept of concurrent licensing – rather than licensing ever shift worker, you instead buy enough licenses to cover the maximum number of desktops active at any one time. For example, 300 users who work in 3 shifts of 100 users = 100 licenses needed.

From a management perspective, the licenses will not show as assigned to users (as they are applied at the tenant level) so you will need to use the W365 utilization report to see how many licenses are being used.

Learn more here – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/enterprise/introduction-windows-365-frontline and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/04/06/windows-365-offers-flexibility-from-the-office-or-home-to-the-frontline/

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Microsoft VLSC features move to M365 Admin Center


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It’s been a while since there’s been much to say about the good old VLSC (Volume Licensing Service Center) – it’s been ticking along for years – but there is an update now. Many of its volume licensing features are being moved to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center (MAC), this includes:

  • Downloads and keys
  • License Summary
  • Relationship Summary

Note the latter two will both be found under “Contracts” in the M365 Admin Center.

This means customers will have one place to manage their VL and Subscription licenses…will the MPSA Business Center be merged too?

You can see more info from Microsoft here.

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Microsoft Product Terms: November 2022


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This month we’ve 2 new M365 data related SKUs:


M365 Advanced Data Residency
M365 Cross-tenant User Data Migration

There is also the removal of:
Microsoft Threat Experts
SharePoint Advanced Management Plan 1

The SharePoint SKU was only added last month but there was very little info available, so it seems likely it was added in error. Let’s see if/when it reappears.

A nice addition – Azure Active Directory Basic now allows unlimited SSO (Single Sign On) – the previous limit was 10 apps so à really significant change.

There is a 50% off promo for Defender for Endpoint on EA from Nov 1, 2023 to June 30, 2023

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Microsoft Financial Results: Q1 FY23


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Let’s take a look at Microsoft’s financial results for the first quarter of FY23.

  • Overall revenue was $50.1 billion, an increase of 11%.
  • Operating income was $21.5 billion, up 6%…
  • but Net income was down 14% to $17.6 billion
  • Operating expenses were up 15% to $13.2 billion.

Looking at the individual divisions we see:

Productivity & Business Processes

Overall revenue up 9% to $16.5 billion and within that:

  • Office 365 Commercial revenue up 11%
  • LinkedIn revenue up 17%
  • Dynamics 365 revenue up 24%

Intelligent Cloud

Overall revenue was up 20% to $20.3 billion and within that:

  • Azure growth of 35%

Still a good increase but noticeably slowing down from previous quarters. Microsoft note that cloud margins are down primarily due to increased energy bills.

More Personal Computing

Overall revenue decreased slightly to $13.3 billion and within that:

  • Windows OEM revenue decreased 15%
  • Devices revenue increased 2%

Earnings Call

  • Satya Nadella was quick to point out the hybrid/multi-vendor approaches possible with Azure – talking about SAP & Oracle in the first couple of paragraphs.
  • PowerApps has almost 15 million monthly active users (MAU), a 50% year on year increase, and Power Automate has reached 7 million MAU.
  • Nadella also talked about Teams and how chat has overtaken email as where the average user spends their time. He also said:

“Teams is becoming a ubiquitous platform for business process.”

and shared that the number of enterprise users running 3rd party/custom apps has increased 60% year over year.

  • Microsoft Viva already has 20 million MAU – just the start of things for this line-up I’m sure.
  • Amy Hood spoke about strong E5 momentum being driven by security, compliance, and voice products and an increase in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) too.
  • Nadella also stated:

“we are going to optimize for long-term customer loyalty by proactively helping them optimize [Azure] spend“

This follows on from what he said last quarter (and also matches what AWS recently said) that helping customers waste less will ultimately help them spend more.

Further Reading

See all the info, slides, and transcripts here.

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Microsoft Intune Premium Suite


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Microsoft, somewhat confusingly, “introduced” Intune at Ignite 2022…despite it having existed for what – at least a decade at this point?! It’s more of a Jay-Z style “allow me to re-introduce myself” as it seems Microsoft have decided to make Intune the primary brand for endpoint management going forwards…say goodbye to Microsoft Endpoint Management (MEM) as part of this.

The new suite will include:

  • Remote Help for Windows & Android
  • Microsoft Tunnel for Mobile App Management
  • Endpoint Privilege Management
  • Advanced endpoint analytics

as well as more features to be announced in 2023.

The add-on license will be available for Microsoft 365 E3/E5 and any licenses that include Intune and will, not surprisingly, be cheaper than buying all the individual components separately. This is another example of where organisations licensed with M365 E5 must still acquire additional licenses – something I know many are not happy with.

Further Reading

See more details on the features here.

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