The February 2017 Hosting and Cloud Service Provider Newsletter is out. There’s just one item of licensing interest: the FY17 Q3 Quarterly Licensing Brief webinar is available for viewing, originally broadcast on March 2nd.
It’s worth a watch for these topics: License Mobility Update, SPLA 2017 Resources, SPE in CSP and you can find it here: http://bit.ly/2n4ROP8.
Sign up for this free newsletter here: http://bit.ly/2gbk5iR.
Microsoft announce that group-based licence management is now in public preview. This will offer two new services: firstly, you can assign a licence template to an Azure AD security group and then as users join and leave the group, licences are automatically assigned and removed. Secondly, you’ll be able to selectively disable components in product licences so that you can do a phased roll-out of the services of Office 365 E5 for example.
Find the Microsoft announcement here: http://bit.ly/2lvlpF5.
Microsoft announce that Premium Assurance is available. As a reminder, this is an Add-on that you can buy for Windows Server and/or SQL Server, if you have Software Assurance, to give you an extra six years of product support. Other key facts are that you have to buy it for ALL of your Windows/SQL Servers with active SA, and the price will increase in July 2017. Find the Microsoft announcement here: http://bit.ly/2ms74rZ.
Confused about how to license OMS in CSP? (That’s the Operations Management + Security Suite in the Cloud Solution Provider program if you’re already confused!) There’s a useful new Microsoft article that explains all. Essentially, the OMS services are available through CSP but the SKUs aren’t – so you can buy the individual components of OMS E2, but not E2 itself with the associated discount. It’s also worth noting that you don’t get rights to System Center if you buy through CSP either.
Get the full story and some deployment examples here: http://bit.ly/2l32oW9.
Need to license Bing Maps for Enterprise?
This page is a useful overview of the different options: http://bit.ly/2kDXilP.
Do you manage the formerly-known-as-MSDN Subscriptions for your organisation? You may know that they’re now known as Visual Studio Subscriptions and there’s change afoot for the management portal.
Find an FAQ detailing what’s happening, as well as administration guides for the current VLSC and MPSA portals here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
We found an updated (September 2016) Enrollment for Education Solutions Licensing Guide where the main change is an adjustment for the renaming of DreamSpark to Microsoft Imagine.
Find this updated guide here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
There’s an updated (2017) licensing datasheet for Windows Server 2016. The layout is reworked and information on Storage Server, MultiPoint Server and Hyper-V Server is removed. Find this datasheet in the Core Infrastructure section in http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
The Services Provider Use Rights (SPUR) document is no longer released monthly – just on an as-needed basis.
There IS a new one for February 2017 which is updated for release management rights in Visual Studio (page 28) and adds Team Member, Sales and Customer Service SALs for Dynamics 365 (page 13).
There are VDA per User Add-on SLs added to the February 2017 Product Terms document. These are designed to be added on to VDA Device SLs and follow the same rules as the Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and E5 Add-ons. See pages 38 and 42-43 of this document.
The February 2017 Online Services Terms document adds some clarity around Dynamics 365 licensing. Firstly, external users don’t need an SL if they’re using the Operations service, but if they’re using Dynamics 365 clients to access the other services then they do. And secondly, it’s confirmed that if you’re licensed for Dynamics 365 Business edition then you don’t have the right to install and use Dynamics 365 on-premises server software. See page 3.