Licence management for Dynamics 365 ERP apps

Microsoft announce changes to the management of licences for the Dynamics 365 ERP apps. From 30 April, 2025 there will be enhanced licence reporting available in the Power Platform Admin Center which will show licence usage across all security roles. Then, from 30 August, 2025 you’ll need to make sure that users have been assigned licenses through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, or they will no longer have access to the Dynamics 365 ERP applications.

Find the announcement article here with tips on preparing for a smooth transition: https://bit.ly/446ehTx.

Copilot in Azure

Microsoft announce that Copilot in Azure is generally available, accessed from the Azure Management Portal and designed to help you answer questions, complete tasks, and discover and utilise Azure services. It was free in preview, and continues to be free now, although a customer’s excessive use of a Microsoft generative AI service may result in temporary throttling of their access to the service.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4lEXfCh.

Dragon Copilot

Microsoft unveil Dragon Copilot, an AI assistant for clinical workflow. It’s a combination of Dragon Medical One (well known for its voice dictation capabilities) and DAX Copilot (which provides ambient listening capabilities). Its objective is to help clinicians with documenting patient records and, to that end, it’s compatible with all major Electronic Health Records solutions and is part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Find the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/4inH2zx.

Core CAL and Enterprise CAL Suites licensing guidance

There’s an updated (March 2025) Core CAL And Enterprise CAL Suites licensing guidance document from Microsoft. There are minimal changes from the February 2025 version and note that a couple of errors still remain in the table on page 3.

Find this document here: https://bit.ly/4iquFTa.

Autoscale for MongoDB solutions

Microsoft announce that Autoscale is now generally available for vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB. You’ll probably gather from the name that this feature eliminates the need for manual scaling, and reduces costs by preventing overprovisioning of capacity.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/41E8KAQ.

Azure-to-Azure ASR TCO calculator

Microsoft announce that there’s a new Azure Site Recovery (ASR) calculator to help you to estimate the total cost of ownership for ASR scenarios and to give you a detailed cost breakdown of the different components.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/41IFyZA, which includes a link to download the Excel-spreadsheet calculator.

Office LTSC licensing guidance

There’s an updated (February 2025) Office LTSC licensing guidance document from Microsoft. It’s a bit of a strange update – features such as Windows To Go (retired by Microsoft in 2020) are still included, and there are some useful tables which have been removed. Be aware too, that there are some new errors sprinkled throughout.

Keep your licensing guidance document collection complete and grab this guide here: https://bit.ly/43TyyeM.

Exchange Online Tenant External Recipient Rate Limit (TERRL)

Microsoft introduce a new tenant-level outbound email limit based on the number of email licences that a tenant has. There’s a table showing sample limits with various licence counts, or you can work it out yourself using the provided formula – have you ever calculated anything to the power of 0.7? Now’s your chance!

Enforcement starts from 3 April, 2025 and you can find all the pertinent details with a useful FAQ in the lengthy announcement article here: https://bit.ly/4ijbhYm.

Step-up licenses licensing guidance

There’s an updated (February 2025) Step-up licenses licensing guidance document from Microsoft, with minimal changes, covering the way Step-up licenses work for on-premises software and Online Services in the traditional Volume Licensing agreements. Help yourself to this updated document here: https://bit.ly/41QlVhW.