There’s an updated (April 2024) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide which is updated for the availability of Supply Chain Management Premium. This gives new SCM demand planning capabilities powered by Copilot, and it’s licensed via a User Subscription Licence costing $300 per user per month, with a minimum purchase of 10 licences. Pages 28 – 31 of the guide are updated where it’s easy to see which features are exclusive to this new licence.
Find the updated guide here: https://bit.ly/3xFRi3i.
Microsoft announce that it’s now possible to turn on the Auto-renew option for a Reservation at the time of purchase. The setting is off by default, and you can (as before) enable or disable the Auto-renew option at any time up to the expiration of the existing Reservation.
See the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/447jdWk.
Microsoft announce that there will be price increases to the Dynamics range of products from 1 October, 2024 affecting both cloud versions and their on-premises equivalents.
The increases range from 10.53% for the CRM Enterprise licences ($105 from $95) to 16.67% for the ERP Enterprise licences ($210 from $180), with an increase of $15 for all tiers for Microsoft Relationship Sales licences. Pricing for Dynamics 365 Business Central remains unchanged.
The increases apply globally for all new customers, and for existing customers on their next renewal after 1 October, 2024.
You can find the full table of changes here: https://bit.ly/4cWIoP8, and the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/4cUruRp.
There’s an updated (April 2024) Power Platform Licensing Guide with a couple of changes.
Firstly, it’s updated for the new Finance Premium and Supply Chain Management licences – both licensed per user per month at $300.
Then there are some wording changes which make it sound like there are some new licences… Previously, use rights for Power Apps/Automate included in some Microsoft 365/Office 365 licences were called just that – “included use rights”. Now, the set of Power Apps rights included in Microsoft 365/Office 365 licences is called Power Apps Basic (see page 11), and likewise for Power Automate Basic (page 17).
Get the updated guide here: https://bit.ly/4aJbQ9m.
There are updated (April 2024) Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents adjusted for the removal of Teams (see our blog: https://bit.ly/3vC9SZR).
These useful documents tell you which (of the many) different components are included in which Office 365/Microsoft 365 plan, and there’s a table for SMB customers (https://bit.ly/4aRMdDy), and one for Enterprise customers (https://bit.ly/4aPxgSg), and still more for specialist US customers – one for GCC (https://bit.ly/3Jl5Ub0), one for GCC High (https://bit.ly/4cR0GS9) and the final one for DoD (https://bit.ly/49Bmqyy). And, if you’re a partner, there’s exciting news – we’ve found the Excel version of these files!
Drop us an email on info@licensingschool.co.uk from your work email address and we’ll send it on.
Microsoft announce that Supply Chain Management Premium is available, which gives new demand planning capabilities for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management powered by Copilot. It’s licensed via a User Subscription Licence costing $300 dollars per user per month, with a minimum purchase of 10 licences.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3JkV98N, and pricing and product information here: https://bit.ly/3UhDO5R.
In October 2023, Microsoft made changes to Office 365 and Microsoft 365 licences for customers in the EEA and Switzerland. Essentially, these changes removed Teams from certain suites for customers who had never purchased Office/Microsoft 365 before. You can get up to speed on that on our blog here.
Now, from 1April, 2024 those changes are extended to the rest of the world, described by Microsoft in an article here. In essence, the news is the same as for the EEA and Switzerland, so here’s the summary:
A customer outside the EEA and Switzerland who has not purchased Office 365 E1/E3/E5 or Microsoft 365 E3/E5 before 1 April, 2024 must now buy “(no Teams)” SKUs – which, as the names suggest, don’t include Teams. If the customer does want Teams, then they need to additionally purchase a separate Teams Enterprise User SL for their users. If they HAVE purchased any of the original licences before 1 April then they can add more licences and renew existing Subscriptions. Alternatively they can buy the new licences, and even mix and match them with the new licences if they want to.
For Microsoft 365 Business Basic/Standard/Premium, customers in the affected regions will be able to choose the original offerings that include Teams or the new (no Teams) flavours. The same goes for Microsoft 365 F1/F3 and Office 365 F3.
This site, aimed at partners, has a lot of additional resources that might be useful.
Microsoft announce that Copilot for Security will be generally available on April 1st, 2024.
If you’re not sure how Copilot fits in with security then this video (https://bit.ly/3VBv5h5) is a good minute-long overview of AI-powered security.
Customers will be able to choose a standalone Copilot experience or an embedded one (find a good diagram on the announcement page here: https://bit.ly/3TV4Qkf) and both will be billed on a consumption model. It’s all going to work via a new Security Compute Unit (SCU) which costs $4/hour billed, as usual, against an existing or new Azure Subscription.
There’s a new (February 2024) Microsoft 365 Enterprise Licensing Guide which we’ve added to our amazing emporium of Licensing Guides (https://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides). It looks like this document has been updated for the changes to From SA licences from 1 February, 2024 (see our blog here: https://bit.ly/3IUJqxl) but really truly a poor job has been done with too many errors and chunks of out-of-date information.
For those who like a complete set of Microsoft’s documentation, find this guide here: https://bit.ly/499rSZf.
Microsoft announce that licence auto-claim for Power Automate is generally available. This is a feature that enables administrators to set up policies in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center to automatically assign licences to users who need them.
Find the announcement article with instructions on how to create the policies here: https://bit.ly/4aevB95.