Microsoft announce the general availability of the new Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for Android phone – http://bit.ly/1JkxvWJ.
As usual, everyone gets access to the core features, while the premium features require a qualifying Office 365 subscription.
This page is useful for finding out exactly what the qualifying Office 365 plans are: http://bit.ly/1IAfQEP.
It’s always good to come across a new Licensing Guide and this Windows Server 2012 R2 one is pretty comprehensive. It’s dated April 2015 and has all the information contained in previously released datasheets as well as a long FAQ section where you’ll find all the usual suspects as well as a couple of useful Azure-related questions (Q21 onwards) clarifying a couple of Licence Mobility issues.
Definitely worth downloading for your Useful Licensing Guides folder: http://bit.ly/1e3uNa4.
If you’re an Action Pack subscriber or a Microsoft partner with a competency then you have rights to use Microsoft software and it’s the Product Usage Guide which details these rights. While most of the rights are exactly what you’d expect, there are some interesting changes and exceptions which are worth knowing about.
First of all, there are virtually no SA benefits associated with the licences that you get as a partner, so if you want to deploy VDI desktops or Windows To Go for example, then you’d need to acquire Windows licences with SA (or VDA) under a normal Volume Licensing agreement. The same would be true for SA benefits such as unlimited virtualisation or Licence Mobility associated with SQL Server. However, competency partners do get access to Office Online (Office Web Apps) and the Multi-Language Pack with their Office Professional Plus licences.
CALs are on the list of available licences for many partners, and can generally be used as Device or User CALs. If you’re eligible for a Project Professional licence then be aware it doesn’t have a Project Server CAL included, and the Exchange Enterprise CAL comes without Services so licences for Exchange Online Protection, for example, would have to be acquired separately.
And finally, there are a couple of rights excluded that could catch you out if you’re expecting the rights to be the same as a regular Volume Licensing licence. The first is the fact that there are no downgrade rights included at all and in fact partners have 12 months to upgrade internal-use software to a newer version. It’s only competency partners who can run Office Professional Plus 2013 in an RDS environment and no partners are allowed to use their Office licences in a Windows To Go deployment. And lastly, as you’d possibly expect, the software isn’t to be used for employee personal use at home.
The Product Usage Guide is also useful for details of licence maximums, sharing of licences, and licence entitlements, as well as activation of on-premises and cloud services.
Enjoy the full 35 pages of the guide by downloading it here: http://bit.ly/1ecZavu.
If you look at page 10 of the June 2015 Product List you’ll find that there are no changes listed for this month. So, we had to dig a bit deeper to find the (admittedly extraordinarily minor!) changes:
Microsoft announced last week that Windows 10 will be available on 29 July 2015.
This FAQ gives lots of information on the upgrade process, but here are the key licensing facts:
Read the whole FAQ here: http://bit.ly/1KPXWR8.
This is a nice article on 10 of the MSDN benefits including rights to deploy to Azure, perpetual use rights, Azure credit, Visual Studio Online, and Store and Office 365 Developer Accounts. Find it here: http://bit.ly/1LQ1Av2.
There’s a bit of confusion over the dates associated with the retirement of Select Plus… Be confused no longer – invest a mere four minutes and watch our latest Coffee Break video on this very topic: http://bit.ly/LSyoutube.