A new way to buy and manage Microsoft Azure services

Microsoft announce that from March 2019 there will be a new way to buy and manage Microsoft Azure services directly from Microsoft. Customers will have a new agreement – the Microsoft Customer Agreement – which will replace any existing agreements that they are buying Azure through, and will be a non-expiring, simpler agreement.

Management of the Azure services is likely to be easier too with a single portal for account and cost management, and billing and invoicing. Note that to start with, customers will be invited by Microsoft directly to purchase through this new agreement.

Find out more and access an FAQ here: http://bit.ly/2D24dhg.

CSP Subscription Billing Frequency Changes

If you’re a CSP partner then you might like to know that from 31 October, 2018 you can now change the billing frequency of a Subscription for the Online Services (Office 365 etc) from monthly to annual, and vice versa.

Find an FAQ here: http://bit.ly/2T0izF0 and an updated billing article here: http://bit.ly/2FfyA77.

Updated Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (November 2018) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide. The main changes are the addition of the Dynamics 365 AI for Sales app (page 15) and some extra clarity around the new Order Lines add-on (page 45). You’ll also notice that some fairly major restructuring has taken place.

Find this guide alongside the rest of the Microsoft Licensing Guides here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.

Dynamics 365 AI Apps

The Dynamics 365 AI apps build on the intelligent capabilities in Dynamics 365 to offer additional insights. Microsoft announce that Dynamics 365 AI for Sales is now available in the US (http://bit.ly/2JCVK69).

From a licensing perspective, it’s available for users already licensed with Sales Enterprise, Microsoft Relationship Sales Solution, Customer Engagement Plan, or Dynamics 365 Plan, as an add-on at $50 per user per month (http://bit.ly/2zoVQtg).

Dynamics 365 AI for Customer Service (http://bit.ly/2JCWNmB) and Dynamics 365 AI for Market Insights (http://bit.ly/2QfgNxP) are also available in public preview.

New SA Benefit: Access to Exchange Online Voice Mail Service

Microsoft add a new Software Assurance benefit to the November 2018 Product Terms. Customers with active SA for Exchange Server Standard/Enterprise 2019 may use the Exchange Online Voice Mail Service to access voice messages from Outlook.

The details are on page 25, and you can download the Product Terms every month here: http://bit.ly/MSproductterms.

Home Use Program: Office 2019

The Home Use Program is available to those customers who have active Software Assurance on their Office suite or applications licences, and it enables users of licensed devices to buy Office products at a heavily discounted price for home use. Office 2019 is now available through this program with a choice of Office Professional Plus 2019, Office Home and Business 2019, Visio Professional 2019 and Project Professional 2019.

They are all priced at $14.99, an increase from $9.99, and you can find out about the HUP program and order the products here: http://bit.ly/2Dd65VN.

Azure Reservations

Azure Reservations are a way of pre-paying for an Azure resource over a one or three-year term to get the most cost-effective pricing. The Reservations family continues to grow: it started with Reserved Instances, a way of pre-paying for Azure virtual machine base compute, and was extended with Reserved Capacity, a way of pre-paying for Azure SQL Database compute capacity. Today the family also includes Software Reservations for SUSE Linux software, and Reserved Capacity for Azure Cosmos DB throughput.

This page (http://bit.ly/2Q3vm7J) gives you an overview of Reservations and if you expand the “Buy a reservation” link at the left you can get details on the current four members of the Reservations family.