Secure Productive Enterprise was launched on 1 October 2016 and is the successor to the Enterprise Cloud Suite. Now there are some useful new Microsoft resources available: there’s a Licensing Guide which gives an overview of the licences available, considers 6 customer scenarios, and has a couple of pages of FAQs. Then there’s an “At a Glance” document and “Overview and FAQ” if you just want to know the headlines.

As usual, find these resources with all their Licensing Guide friends at http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.

There’s an updated (November 2016) Visual Studio Licensing whitepaper which has been amended to include Team Foundation Server 2017 (no changes to the licensing) and the new Release Management capabilities that are available.

Find the guide in the usual place here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.

Nano Server is a new deployment choice for Windows Server 2016 which requires Software Assurance on the Windows Server licences, and page 45 of the December 2016 Product Terms document confirms that you need SA on the CALs too.

Microsoft announce that Microsoft PowerApps is generally available: http://bit.ly/2fuF4yT. PowerApps is all about creating apps (perhaps unsurprisingly!) and if you’re new to this product then I’d recommend watching the video on this “Introduction to PowerApps” page since it will give you a good insight into the sorts of things you can do: http://bit.ly/2fuL4rw.

PowerApps is licensed by user and Office 365 and Dynamics 365 licensed users have some basic PowerApps functionality included, and there are also more advanced standalone plans – PowerApps Plan 1 and Plan 2. Users licensed with the new Dynamics Enterprise Plan 1 or Plan 2 have PowerApps Plan 2 functionality included.

This page gives you a summary of what’s in what plan: http://bit.ly/2fKdhOl and if you want some examples of different apps and how they would be licensed, then this page is a good resource: http://bit.ly/2eNu1iG.

Microsoft announce that Microsoft Flow is generally available. What exactly is Flow? Well, it’s short for “workflow” and it’s there to help power users automate repetitive tasks.

There’s some guided learning available for Flow and this page (http://bit.ly/2f8DX9I) shows an example: you could automatically add popular Twitter followers talking about your company as leads in Dynamics 365 and then send a follow-up email via Mailchimp.

And the licensing? Well, there are standalone Flow plans (Flow Free, Plan 1 and Plan 2) and it’s also included in some Dynamics 365 and Office 365 plans too which gives us a fourth set of features – “Flow for Office 365 and Flow for Dynamics 365”.

This page is a good resource to find out what’s included in what plan: http://bit.ly/2fSuHHI and you can find the availability announcement here: http://bit.ly/2eewxSM.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 will be released on 1 November 2016 and there’s a useful page from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner Community team which gives you an introduction to the licensing and links to several useful resources including a Pricing and Licensing FAQ.

It’s definitely worth a read – find it here: http://bit.ly/2dM586y.