There’s an updated (February 2025) Office LTSC licensing guidance document from Microsoft. It’s a bit of a strange update – features such as Windows To Go (retired by Microsoft in 2020) are still included, and there are some useful tables which have been removed. Be aware too, that there are some new errors sprinkled throughout.
Keep your licensing guidance document collection complete and grab this guide here: https://bit.ly/43TyyeM.
Microsoft introduce a new tenant-level outbound email limit based on the number of email licences that a tenant has. There’s a table showing sample limits with various licence counts, or you can work it out yourself using the provided formula – have you ever calculated anything to the power of 0.7? Now’s your chance!
Enforcement starts from 3 April, 2025 and you can find all the pertinent details with a useful FAQ in the lengthy announcement article here: https://bit.ly/4ijbhYm.
There’s an updated (February 2025) Step-up licenses licensing guidance document from Microsoft, with minimal changes, covering the way Step-up licenses work for on-premises software and Online Services in the traditional Volume Licensing agreements. Help yourself to this updated document here: https://bit.ly/41QlVhW.
Microsoft announce that Copilot is now available in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center for administrators to ask natural language questions as they tackle unfamiliar tasks. As long as an organisation has purchased 1 licence of Microsoft 365 Copilot, anyone with access to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center can use Copilot in this way.
Find the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/4ie2d73.
There are updated (March 2025) Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents with lines added for Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting and XDR.
These useful documents tell you which of the (many) different components are included in which Office 365/Microsoft 365 plan, and there’s a table for SMB customers (https://bit.ly/4kyNmWi), one for Enterprise customers (https://bit.ly/4hDoMRj), and still more for specialist US Government customers – one for GCC (https://bit.ly/4bYkXoy), one for GCC High (https://bit.ly/41ApWqX) and the final one for DoD (https://bit.ly/4hF1CKf).
There’s an updated (March 2025) Power Platform Licensing Guide with a new Managed Environments section on page 30 making it clear which licences and/or Pay-As-You-Go meters give rights to the premium features included in Managed Environments.
Find this updated guide here: https://bit.ly/4kYlWcv.
Microsoft announce that the Skype client will only be available until 5 May, 2025 with, of course, the focus turning to the free flavour of Microsoft Teams.
You can find the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/420GOae, with information on how to move to Teams, export your Skype data if you don’t want to move to Teams, and what to do if you’ve still got Skype credit.
There’s an updated (February 2025) software reimaging rights licensing guidance document from Microsoft. There aren’t major changes – just a few version updates and references to VLSC changed to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
Grab this updated guide here: https://bit.ly/4bXLXVe.
Microsoft announce that Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus is currently in preview and will be available in Spring 2025. Like the existing Windows 365 Cross Region Disaster Recovery capability it will be an Add-on licence for Windows 365 Enterprise. So, what’s the difference between these two options? Well, it’s all about how quickly your systems are back up and running and the maximum amount of data loss that’s acceptable. Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus improves on these metrics and you can find a useful table comparing the two licences on the announcement page here: https://bit.ly/4ie1pix.
There’s an updated (March 2025) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide with just a few minor changes. You can find these documented in the Change Log on page 60 with perhaps the most significant being the removal of Fraud Protection.
Find out more about that on our blog here: https://bit.ly/4hrYRMn, and download the updated guide here: https://bit.ly/4hlwoYG.