Category: Power Platform

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Microsoft Power Pages


Microsoft may have taken a trip to Greyskull as, to paraphrase He-Man they:

“Have the Poweeeeerrrrr…Pages”

The newest member of the Power Platform family, Power Pages is a upgraded version of Power Platform Portals – moving from a component to a fully-fledged standalone product.

What does it do?

Power Pages is designed to help easily create websites using drag & drop plus a range of templates available. Microsoft are positioning it as good for uses including FAQ sites, self-service portals, support sites and more.

https://powerpages.microsoft.com/en-gb/?wt.mc_ID=Build2022_fld_us_bl_oo_bl_PowerPlatform

Making it easier to create better, more powerful and nicer looking websites will actually be pretty useful for (parts of) organisations of all sizes.

Licensing

There are 2 options based on authenticated and anonymous users:

Authenticated users per website

This starts at $200 per 100 users per site per month with volume pricing available:

As it is per site, users authenticating against multiple sites will use additional capacity.

Anonymous users per website

This starts at $75 per 500 users per site per month with volume pricing available:

As it is per site, users browsing multiple sites will use additional capacity.

Further Reading

Power Pages announcement

Power Pages capabilities – more here

Pricing info

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Microsoft Product Terms: July 2021


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Microsoft 365 Education Insights Premium listed as an add-on for Office 365 A1/A3/A5 and Microsoft 365 A3/A5

The “Third Party re-imaging clause” has been added to the Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA), although I’m not 100% sure why at the moment.

Windows “Get Genuine” licenses have been added to the Microsoft Customer Agreement – is this related to the above addition perhaps?

Various terms and clauses updated – including one which clarifies that Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) access rights in Window 10 licenses are limited to customers’ own tenant.s

M365 E5 security/compliance add-ons removed as pre-requisites for Premium Assessments.

Professional Direct Support added for Power Platform. Licenses must be acquired for every Dynamics 365 and Power Platform license on the agreement – but has a maximum of 250. Any licenses above that are covered without additional licenses being required.

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Microsoft Power Apps price reductions


Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay

Microsoft announced on July 1, 2021 that they’re cutting the price of Power Apps in half(ish) from October 1, 2021.

Power Apps per User

This was $40 per user per month but will be $20 from October 1, 2021.

Power Apps per App

This was $10 per user per app per month but will $5 from October 1, 2021. However, it should be noted that the features have been reduced too – currently it gives access to:

2 x Apps and 1 x Portal

But under the new rules, each license will allow access to:

1 x App or 1 x Portal

Meaning certain scenarios may not see a real price reduction.

Customers with licenses purchased before October 1, 2021 will retain the current entitlements until renewal.

For organisations looking to purchase before October 2021, there are two promotions which have been extended:

Power Apps per user Promo

$12 per user per month with a minimum purchase of 5,000 licenses.

Power Apps per app Promo

$3 per user per app per month with a minimum purchase of 200 licenses.

There is also promotional pricing available for Power Apps Portals login capacity – both for Tier 4 (25,000+ logins per month) and Tier 5 (100,000+ logins per month).

Microsoft’s announcement is here.

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Microsoft Financial Results: Q3 FY21


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Microsoft’s financial results for Q3 FY21 (Jan – Mar 21) are in and, as usual, they’re pretty impressive.

  • Revenue = $41.7 billion – up 19%
  • Operating income = $17 billion – up 31%

Looking at the different product divisions we can see:

Productivity & Business Processes

Revenue = $13.6 billion – up 15%

Office 365 Commercial was up 22%, LinkedIn increased 25%, and Dynamics 365 was up 45%.

Microsoft Teams is up to 145 million daily active users, almost doubling YoY and Office 365 Commercial has nearly 300 million paid seats. Office Commercial products (on-premises Office) was down 25% – continuing its downwards trend as organisations continue to move to the cloud.

Satya Nadella revealed that Power Platform now has almost 16 million monthly active users, an increase of 97%, and revenue has increased by 84%. Amy Hood (CFO) called out Power Apps and Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations as strong performers.

Intelligent Cloud

Revenue = $15.1 billion – up 23%

Azure growth was 50% yet again, with Amy Hood highlighting an increase in the number of large, long-term Azure contracts.

On-premises server products grew 3%, although that seems to largely be due to year on year currency fluctuations, and the EMS install base grew again, now sitting at 174 million seats.

SQL Server on Azure VMs grew 129% YoY alongside Cosmos DB growth too.

More Personal Computing

Revenue = $13 billion – up 19%

Again there was a big difference in Windows OEM as Pro revenue declined 2% but non-Pro grew 44%.

See the Microsoft details here.

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Microsoft Power Automate Desktop – free


Microsoft have announced that their Power Automate Desktop product is going to be free for Windows 10 users. Power Automate is Microsoft’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) offering and, as the name suggests, the product in question here is the desktop variant.

RPA is a rapidly growing hot topic within businesses as people look to do “more with less” and to use their time to drive and deliver real business value – rather than “busy work”. Typically these will be things like compiling information and creating reports – it needs doing but it’s repetitive (read boring) and doesn’t really need human input…certain things need putting in certain places at certain times. The repetitive nature makes it perfect for RPA – thing of an Excel macro on steroids – replicating actions across a variety of desktop applications and websites…while you do more important things 😊

This is an example of what you can do from Microsoft:

Automate tasks with Power Automate Desktop for Windows 10—no additional cost | Power Automate Blog (microsoft.com)

Power Automate Desktop will eventually be built into Windows 10 – it will start to appear in Insider Builds shortly – but for those of you as impatient as me, you can download it here.

I wonder if this will cause any other RPA vendors (such as UIpath) to launch a case against Microsoft for unfair bundling – like Slack recently did re: Teams?

Further Reading

Microsoft announcement

Download here

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Microsoft Product Terms: December 2020


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As you’d expect, it’s a quiet month.

Microsoft 365 Business Voice, the SMB cloud telephony package, is added. Available via CSP and requires Microsoft 365 Business Basic/Business Standard/Business Premium.

The various name changes (ATP = Defender etc.) have (finally) been updated.

2 x Power Apps promotions that could be quite interesting have been added:

“Power Apps per App” promo = Available to new/existing EA/EAS/CSP customers & has a minimum purchase of 200.

“Power Apps per User” promo = Available to new/existing EA or EAS (not CSP) customers & has a minimum purchase of 5,000.

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Microsoft Power BI Premium per-user


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Announced at Microsoft Ignite 2020, Power BI Premium has a new “per-user” licensing model. Previously available only via a “capacity” model, at a pretty high price point, this new licensing option will make it more cost effective for companies to get started.

The main reason I talk to people about Power BI Premium is licensing. With Power BI Pro, EVERY user consuming a dashboard need a Pro license – which can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. Power BI Premium per Capacity removes the need for each user to be licensed with Pro meaning, even with it’s high monthly cost, it can work out more cost-effective for heavy use cases.

While there have been feature differences between Pro & Premium, they’ve not been a reason for these conversations – now however, it looks as though that Microsoft hope that may change. This new licensing model makes it easier, and cheaper, for smaller orgs and teams of developers to access the high-end Power BI Premium features. Perhaps this is an effort to compete further with Salesforce Tableau et al.

Chart comparing the Premium features per user vs. capacity
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/answering-your-questions-around-the-new-power-bi-premium-per-user-license/?s=09

To access content in a “Premium per-user workspace”, each user must have a “Premium per-user” license so the licensing, in a nutshell is:

If you want to get access to the additional Premium features for named users, Premium per user (PPU) is the way to go.

If you want to allow unfettered access to dashboards without worrying about per user licensing, Premium per capacity is still the answer.

Getting access

Whilst in preview, Power BI Premium per-user will be free of charge. Regarding eventual pricing, Microsoft said in their announcement:

Premium per user will be uniquely affordable and highly competitive among individual user offerings in the industry.  Stay tuned for the official pricing announcement as we get closer to the GA timeframe.  I guarantee you won’t want to miss it.

You can sign up to be notified when the preview goes live here – https://info.microsoft.com/ww-landing-power-bi-premium-per-user.html?LCID=EN-US

The “further details” link below has a well moderated comments section which features several answers from Microsoft clarifying some of the common questions too.

Further Reading

Microsoft Announcement

Further details from Microsoft

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Microsoft Product Terms: August 2020


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Nothing too major this month, as expected:

  • The Teams Advanced Communications SKU has been added
  • There are a few updates to SQL Hybrid Benefit info for Server Subscriptions
  • Added extra Power Platforms info covering:
    • Purchase minimums
    • Extended Use Rights for Portals
    • Additional pre-requisites

Nothing new for Power Platform, really just moving key info from the licensing guide to the Product Terms – which is the way it should be.

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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:

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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