Microsoft introduce Microsoft 365 Business Premium for GCC-High. This offering, aimed at suppliers to US government organisations, provides robust security and compliance features for up to 500 (not 300!) users. It helps meet complex compliance requirements like the CMMC, providing essential enterprise-grade capabilities for smaller organisations in regulated environments.
Find out more here: https://bit.ly/4r4Y6is.
Commitment Tiers in Microsoft Sentinel are well named: if you commit to a certain amount of ingestion capacity every day then there are different tiers of discounted pricing. Historically, the lowest tier has been a commitment of 100 GB a day, but there’s a new 50 GB tier in public preview with promotional pricing until March 31, 2026. Customers who sign up during this period will lock in promotional pricing until March 31, 2027.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/49j7GrB, and the Sentinel pricing page here: https://bit.ly/4oGz6wr.
There are updated (November 2025) Dynamics 365 licensing resources now available. The Licensing Guide has a few changes, reflecting the adjustments to Business Central storage and pricing. You can read about these on our blog here: https://bit.ly/4p1TuYp. References to Microsoft 365 Copilot for Service and Sales are gone, as these are now licensed via a Microsoft 365 Copilot User SL. There’s a new Appendix added for Dynamics 365 Agents in Paid Public Preview – moved from the Copilot Studio Licensing Guide. There’s also extra detail added to the Team Members Use Rights table in Appendix D.
Read the Licensing Guide for more information here: https://bit.ly/49zYhfc, or find the Licensing Deck here: https://bit.ly/4nIXvjv.
Visual Studio 2026 is now generally available! This new release of the IDE software brings enhancements to speed and the user interface, and it’s fully compatible with projects and extensions from Visual Studio 2022. Naturally, the AI features are a major highlight! It incorporates integrated AI capabilities, like the Debugger Agent, which resolves code right before your eyes.
The Product Terms and SPUR have been updated for this release, and you can explore the Microsoft announcement here: https://bit.ly/3WNsHmK.
There are updated (November 2025) Power Platform licensing resources now available. References to AI Builder Capacity Packs have been removed, as part of the transition to Copilot Credits, which you can read more about in our blog here: https://bit.ly/4hOxpdw. On page 21, there’s an updated table that shows the changes to the default capacity entitlements in Dataverse, ahead of the anticipated changes on December 1, 2025.
You’ll find details in the Licensing Guide here: https://bit.ly/48XHjat, and the supplementary Licensing Deck here: https://bit.ly/4olptmm.
Microsoft announce that the Finance Solution in Microsoft 365 Copilot is now generally available. You might have heard of it by a different name since it’s a product that’s already undergone a series of name changes – Copilot for Finance and Finance Agents to name a couple. Now it’s essentially a set of Agents designed to automate various financial tasks across apps like Excel and Outlook, connecting to ERP systems such as Dynamics 365 and SAP. From a licensing perspective, you need to be licensed for Microsoft 365 Copilot and the relevant ERP system.
Find the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/43o2r66.
The options for accessing a Windows 365 Cloud PC have somewhat evolved over time, with an array of choices available! A relatively new offering is Windows 365 Link, a purpose-built hardware device optimised for Windows 365. Windows 365 Boot is a feature that lets you boot directly into your Cloud PC, bypassing the local experience entirely. For hybrid environments, Windows 365 Switch lets you move seamlessly between your local and Cloud PC. Finally, with The Windows App, you gain cross-platform access from virtually any device.
This useful update in the Windows blog provides a helpful summary with more detail: https://bit.ly/49K3Ojg.
The Modern Work Plan Comparison documents for November 2025 have been released. These documents now fully reflect the updated names for the Defender and Purview Add-ons and show the reintroduced Office and Microsoft 365 licenses with Teams included. In the SMB comparison, a new footnote confirms a maximum of 300 User SLs across all Business plans combined. Separate PDF files are available for the Enterprise, SMB, US Government, and Education sectors which you can find here: https://bit.ly/4hn2hS2. If you’re a partner, an Excel version of these files is also available.
If you’d like a copy, drop us an email from your work email address to info@licensingschool.co.uk, and we’ll send it on.
Microsoft announce that Software Reservations for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are generally available. There are now 32 members of the Reservations family where you can receive a discount on an Azure service by making a duration-based commitment. For an RHEL Software Reservation you need to commit for a year, and you can expect discounts of up to 24% when you run RHEL software on Azure virtual machines. As we expect with Reservations, this Software Reservation is applied automatically to any deployed RHEL VMs that match the Reservation, and there’s also instance size flexibility which means that the discount is applied even when you deploy a VM with a different virtual core count from the Reservation.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4hNBq1W, and some useful Learn documentation here: https://bit.ly/3JKKqrT.
Microsoft announce the preview of Azure virtual machine vCore customisation, with two features that give you greater control over the CPU resources of a VM. Firstly, you can disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading allowing you to run a VM with only one thread per physical core which can improve performance for certain workloads. Secondly, and more interesting from a licensing perspective, you can choose a custom number of virtual cores for a new VM which is lower than the default count for that VM size. Now, this doesn’t reduce the price of the VM, but it can reduce the licensing costs for software billed by virtual core – SQL Server for example.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/47609uA, and some useful Learn documentation here: https://bit.ly/4oRzSWU.