Author Archives: Louise Ulrick

Controlling Azure costs

There’s a really useful article on the Microsoft FinOps blog about managing Azure spend through governance and Azure Policy rules. It’s aiming to help you to prevent overspend rather than react to it, and it’s a practical read for anyone responsible for cloud cost optimisation. There’s a nice table called “The Wasteful Eight” to help you focus on where you might currently be using resources that are over-provisioned, or configured with unused premium features, for example.

Find this article here: https://bit.ly/3HSGFzg.

Copilot Studio Agent Usage Estimator

There’s a new Copilot Studio Agent Usage Estimator from Microsoft. The unit of consumption of Agents is a message and different sorts of queries “cost” varying amounts of messages, dependent on how hard the Agent has to work to produce an answer.

Find this new tool in preview here: https://bit.ly/4jMS2pM.

GitHub Copilot Pro+

GitHub announce a new flavour of GitHub Copilot for individuals. The Pro+ edition gives developers all the features in Pro as well as access to all models (including Claude Opus 4, o3, and GPT-4.5), 1,500 premium requests per month, and priority access to previews including the in-preview Coding Agent.

Find the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/3HzXU8A.

Copilot Studio Licensing Guide

There’s a brand new (June 2025) Copilot Studio Licensing Guide from Microsoft. All the Copilot Studio information has been taken out of the Power Platform Licensing Guide and put into this new guide with additional sections giving detail on Orchestration Mode, Agent Flow Actions, Copilot Studio Agents in Paid Public Preview, and how to forecast your Agent’s message volume.

Find this new guide here: https://bit.ly/43Sg5xG.

Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents

There are updated (June 2025) Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents with some small changes getting everything up to date: adding in a row for Microsoft Security Exposure Management, for example.

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/43CpQQk), one for Enterprise customers (https://bit.ly/45Cb4M4), and one for Education customers (https://bit.ly/4jxBG4j), and still more for specialist US customers – one for GCC (https://bit.ly/3FEFUcq), one for GCC High (https://bit.ly/3ZH8yAn) and the final one for DoD (https://bit.ly/4kHl3EV).

And, if you’re a partner, we do have a June 2025 Excel version of these files. Drop us an email on info@licensingschool.co.uk from your work email address and we’ll send it on.

Free SQL offers in Azure

Microsoft expand their free SQL offers in Azure. Back in February 2025 they launched the free Azure SQL Database offer which allows you to create up to 10 General Purpose databases in each of your Azure Subscriptions with the first 100,000 vCore seconds, 32 GB of data, and 32 GB of backup storage free per month for the lifetime of the Subscription. The new offer launched in May 2025 is for one Azure SQL Managed Instance in each of your Azure Subscriptions and gives you 720 vCore hours of compute and 64 GB of storage every month for 12 months.

Find the Azure SQL Database offer announcement here: https://bit.ly/4mW016N, and the Azure SQL Managed Instance offer announcement here: https://bit.ly/4l4T4id.

Microsoft 365 Enterprise licensing guidance document

There’s an updated (May 2025) Microsoft 365 Enterprise licensing guidance document from Microsoft. There aren’t major changes to the content – and that’s a shame. When it was last updated in February 2024, we highlighted the fact that there were too many errors and chunks of out-of-date information. As time has gone on, the information is even more out-of-date and, yes, there are more errors.

For those of us who nevertheless like a complete set of Microsoft’s documentation, find this guide here: https://bit.ly/4kFhwGG.

Microsoft 365 Apps and Windows 10 end of support​

Generally speaking, the Microsoft 365 Apps need to run on a supported operating system to receive security updates. However, Microsoft announce that they will continue to provide security updates for the Microsoft 365 Apps running on Windows 10 for three years after Windows 10 reaches end of support in October 2025.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3SKAMGE.

Non-profit grant discontinuations​

Microsoft announce that the free Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Office 365 E1 licences will be discontinued for non-profit customers from 1 July, 2025. There’s a blog article here: https://bit.ly/4mrgyPY to help customers move to Microsoft 365 Business Basic, where the grant of 300 free licences remains, and there’s a partner FAQ here: https://bit.ly/4mqobpC.

Downgrade Rights licensing guidance

There’s an updated (April 2025) Downgrade Rights licensing guidance document from Microsoft. There aren’t major changes, it’s really just updated for the latest product versions – SharePoint Server 2019 is changed to Subscription Edition, for example.

Find this updated document here: https://bit.ly/4m2CQr4.