Microsoft Copilot Studio is a new low-code tool to help “citizen developers” within organisations create their own copilots as well as customize Copilot for Microsoft 365.
Microsoft say it is built on the “foundations of Power Virtual Agents” and other parts of Power Platform too – this is a roundabout way of saying that Power Virtual Agents is included within Copilot Studio. Copilot Studio itself will be included within Copilot for Microsoft 365 licenses…does this mean that the only way for users to continue with Power Virtual Agents is to purchase Copilot for Microsoft 365?
The ability to customise and create Copilots seems very cool and I can imagine there being some fantastic results within organisations. I also think the management of them all will be very tricky!
Microsoft have announced more information about Microsoft 365 Archive, including pricing.
It will cost $0.05 per GB* per month to archive content and will then cost $0.60 per GB to restore that content. There is a 7-day grace period following archival where sites can be re-activated (restored) free of charge.
*This will appear on the bill as $0.00167/GB/day.
Note that archive fees are only charged where active storage + archived storage = more than the tenant’s overall SharePoint storage allocation…which is 1TB + 10GB per user. Reactivation fees are charged whether or not you’re within that allocation.
The price per GB for archiving data is 1/4 of the price for adding additional SharePoint storage, meaning it can help reduce storage costs in environments with strong processes and policies. Currently archiving works at a site level so you can’t restore just a single file, you have to restore the whole site…which could quickly get expensive.
If you want to understand more about SharePoint information management, governance, and more – go and check out Information EXP, they’ve got some great ideas!
Breathing life into an old favourite, Microsoft have brought new features and licensing options to SharePoint Online – partly by wrapping SharePoint Syntex into the new offering. New features include:
Contract renewal alerts
Document portal for external partners/customers
SharePoint eSignature
Translation for files & videos
Personal Information detection
Redaction
Document governance and control
Licensing
There will be 2 licensing models for SharePoint Premium (which can be used simultaneously as needed) , depending on the features you require.
Those coming from Syntex such as:
document processing
eSignature
PII detection
autofill columns
content assembly
translation
image processing
will be available on a Pay As You Go (PAYG) basis on top of most Microsoft 365 plans.
New features such as:
Business Documents app
Documents Hub
Enhanced File viewer
will be available as add-on licenses on top of Microsoft 365 plans – further increasing the number of additional licenses to choose from. Pricing for these will be announced at General Availability in 2024.
Microsoft also talk about “SharePoint Advanced Management” (SAM) which covers content governance and is currently available as an add-on license to:
Microsoft 365 Business Basic/Business Standard/Business Premium/F1/F3/E3/A3/G3/E5/A5/G5; Office 365 F3/E1/A1/E3/A3/G3/E5/A5/G5; SharePoint Online
Microsoft 365 Copilot is added It’s listed for Enterprise Agreements (as expected) but also the MCA (Microsoft Customer Agreement) and nowhere is there any mention of a 300 license minimum.
I assume it is listed under MCA as it’s available on the MCA for Enterprise Customers aka MCA-E – that is for Enterprise customers buying directly from Microsoft rather than those in the CSP channel. It’s rightly been noted that Copilot isn’t visible on the public pricelists so almost certainly isn’t magically available via CSP but without clarifying text in the Product Terms (or anywhere else), it’s not clear. Nothing like a bit of licensing confusion for one of the biggest product releases in ages!
System Center is added to CSP and the “16-cores” per customer requirement is removed when licensing by virtual OSE.
There’s a new AI related term too: “Excessive use of a Microsoft Generative AI Service may result in temporary throttling of Customer’s access to the Microsoft Generative AI Service“
Microsoft have announced their financial results for Q1 FY24 (July – Sept 2023) so let’s dive in and take a look.
Overall revenue was $56.5 billion, a 13% increase Year on Year (YoY), while net income was up 27% to $22.3 billion. The “Microsoft Cloud” revenue hit $31.8 billion which was a 24% increase.
Productivity & Business Processes
Revenue = $18.6 billion, up 13%
Office 365 Commercial = up 13%
Dynamics 365 = up 29%
Office 365 growth is primarily driven by SMB and Frontline SKUs.
Intelligent Cloud
Revenue = $24.3 billion, up 19%
Azure growth was 29% which is the first time for 2 year that the rate of growth has increased quarter on quarter. Q4 FY23 was 26% and now it’s at 29% which shows that spend in Azure is picking up at a newly increased speed.
Earnings call highlights
Azure Arc up to 21,000 customers – a 140% increase YoY. <– How much of this is driven by the new PAYG ESUs and Microsoft’s push?
16,000+ customers using Microsoft Fabric.
20 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) for Power Apps.
Total headcount is 7% lower than 1 year ago.
Satya Nadella gives a shoutout to the newly announced Oracle@Azure program as a driver of cloud growth:
“Once we announced that the Oracle databases are going to be available on Azure, we saw a bunch of unlock from new customers who have a significant Oracle estate that have not yet moved to the cloud, because they needed to rendezvous with the rest of the app estate in one single cloud”
Interesting to see Oracle contributing to Microsoft’s growth!
Lots of talk of AI throughout, looking ahead to the launch of M365 Copilot on November 1st.
It’s clear that Microsoft are in a strong position and it looks like growth will continue for the foreseeable. Yes there’s a lot of volatility in the world, both economically and politically, but Microsoft have first mover advantage on per-user generative AI for business users with Copilot as well as several other growing products.
Microsoft have announced that Azure Container Apps are now eligible for coverage with Azure compute savings plans, receiving discounts of 15% and 17% with the 1 year and 3 year plans respectively.
With savings plans, you commit to an hourly amount of Azure spend (say £5) and then any eligible services you use receive the discounted rate up to that amount. Anything over £5 will be charged at the regular PAYG rate:
Microsoft recently announced the option to license Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Windows Server & SQL Server via Azure Arc, enabling a monthly Pay As You Go (PAYG) model.
The public pricing page here shows different pricing for Standard edition and Datacenter edition:
As you’d expect, ESUs for Standard edition are significantly cheaper than for Datacenter.
What you wouldn’t expect, or at least I didn’t (!), is this:
When you license ESU for Windows Server via Azure Arc and choose the “vCore licensing” option – which is based on the number of virtual cores being used – Microsoft allows you to pay the Standard edition rate “irrespective of how the underlying server or operating system is licensed”.
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“
The Office 365 “no Teams” EEA SKUs have been added
Azure AD rebranded to Microsoft Entra ID
Universal Print per user added
Microsoft Defender for IoT – EIoT Device License – add-on added
Bit of Viva name tweaking, we now have: Microsoft Viva Employee Communications and Communities Microsoft Viva Workplace Analytics and Employee Feedback
The Copilot Copyright Commitment is added
New Copilot/Generative AI relation terms including:
“Customer may not…try to gain unauthorized access to or disrupt any service, device, data, account or network, including by intentionally evading or disrupting restrictions in Metaprompts”
Microsoft have released the preview of “Microsoft Sentinel for Power Platform” without much fanfare (overshadowed by Copilot really) but I think it could be a very interesting offering. Microsoft Sentinel is a SIEM (security information event and management) platform, aimed at enabling organisations to monitor, discover, remediate, and prevent security attacks across their organisation.
Low code risks
As more and more users develop low code applications within organisations, the risks to those businesses increase. The apps will connect to various internal and external systems, containing and moving data – some of which may be sensitive and/or covered by regulations such as the GDPR or HIPAA – and perhaps linking to web servers and SaaS applications too.
Applications created by highly trained developers with years of experience and huge budgets often suffer from security weaknesses; one can only imagine the potential problems with apps created by citizen developers!
Microsoft Sentinel for Power Platform
This will enable organisations to monitor Power Platform environments and detect any suspicious activity such as:
Power Apps execution from unauthorized geographies
Suspicious data destruction by Power Apps
Mass deletion of Power Apps
Phishing attacks made possible through Power Apps
Power Automate flows activity by departing employees
Microsoft Power Platform connectors added to the an environment
Update or removal of Microsoft Power Platform data loss prevention (DLP) policies
The initial rules included are:
but as we’ve seen with Microsoft Sentinel itself, these will be added to over time.
Almost every organisation will find itself with a large Power App and Power Automate user base so Sentinel for Power Platform could really be worthwhile.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 