Author Archives: licensingschool

August 2015 MPSA Licensing Manual

The MPSA Licensing Manual is updated for some of the key changes that have happened recently.

This August 2015 document includes text on page 4 that confirms that there are no minimums when purchasing Azure consumption services through the MPSA, and there’s an extremely useful paragraph at the top of page 6 that details how the new multi-year duration options work.

Essentially, certain Online Services are available to order up to the second or third Purchasing Account Anniversary and subsequent orders of the same service need to align to the original multi-year order, but are eligible for best price protection too.

Get the document here: http://bit.ly/1QfuR3U.

Licensing Office with RemoteApp

If you want to share Office applications from the cloud then there’s a good article from Microsoft that explains how you need to license this scenario.

Essentially you need an Office 365 ProPlus subscription and an Azure RemoteApp USL – note that a traditional Office Professional Plus 2016 licence isn’t an option.

The article also covers notions such as shared computer activation, Visio and Project, and an overview of how you get started with Office 365 and Azure RemoteApp. It’s definitely worth a read – find it here: http://bit.ly/1MpF6lB.

Office 2016 Availability

Today is the worldwide release of Office 2016 for Windows and there are details in this Microsoft blog post on the new features that you can expect: http://bit.ly/1NRcRzd.

Office 2016 for Mac is also available as a one-time purchase for the first time – since its launch in July it has only been available to Office 365 subscribers. And, as if that wasn’t enough, 2016 versions of Project and Visio are available too.

September 2015 MPSA Changes

Microsoft announce that there are two big updates for the MPSA from 1st September 2015, with the addition of:

  • Enterprise Cloud Suite (ECS)
  • Multi-year subscriptions for Online Services

ECS was previously only available via the Enterprise Agreement (EA) and includes Office 365 E3, the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) and Windows per User, as well as a number of other services– see more info here http://bit.ly/13umyz1.

The second addition enables MPSA customers to order one, two, or three-year subscriptions for certain Online Services with price protection for all incremental orders.

The Microsoft WWLP blog post is here http://bit.ly/1F9uB61

Volume Licensing Guide

There’s a July 2015 Volume Licensing Guide released by Microsoft giving a broad introduction to both program licensing and product licensing.

It covers agreements for commercial, government, nonprofit, and academic customers as well as those aimed at software and service partners.

There’s a nice table on page 19 comparing the commercial programs which is a useful summary. The product licensing section of the document isn’t updated for Windows 10 yet, but again is a good overview of how the licensing works for each product.

Get this guide here: http://bit.ly/1MMvySK.

Microsoft Operations Management Suite

The Microsoft Operations Management Suite (which manages Windows and Linux workloads across a Windows Server datacenter, as well as Azure, Amazon Web Services, OpenStack and VMWare environments) was released in July 2015.

The Suite services are available separately charged as Azure consumption services, or via an Add-on for System Center Standard or Datacenter.

The final page of this OMS datasheet details pricing for the Add-on – for which there’s a promotion until 31 December 2015, as well as listing all of the Azure services that make up the Suite: http://bit.ly/1NqeiDf.

Microsoft Licensing and the Google Cloud Platform

Google announced in mid July 2015 that Windows Server 2012 R2 is now supported on the Google Cloud Platform: http://bit.ly/1MxgkST.

Windows Server image pricing starts at $0.02 USD/hour on top of the virtual machine cost. All Windows images are charged for a minimum of 10 minutes and after that are charged by the minute, rounded up to the nearest minute: http://bit.ly/1Pve4Ke. License Mobility for server applications is also supported and Google talks about that here: http://bit.ly/1fkBjJV.

Cloud Solution Provider Program

The Cloud Solution Provider program allows partners to provide a complete managed cloud solution for their customers. The program is growing – Azure and CRM Online have recently been added and the program itself is available in 131 markets.

If you want to find out more about CSP there’s an extremely comprehensive FAQ site here (http://bit.ly/1Unlh1V) with over 230 questions covering the products, contracts and billing, and available admin tools.