Category Archives: Uncategorized

GA of Exchange Server SE and Skype for Business Server SE editions

Microsoft announce the general availability of the Subscription Editions of Exchange Server and Skype for Business Server, which are the successors to the 2019 editions From a licensing perspective they follow the same rules as for SharePoint Server SE: you need active SA to use the product – or buy the subscription licences – and if the SA lapses, then you retain rights to the 2019 version of the product.

Find the Exchange Server announcement here: https://bit.ly/4noQ0PI, and the Skype for Business Server one here: http://bit.ly/44cZqGC.

Power Platform Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (June 2025) Power Platform Licensing Guide with one big change – all the Copilot Studio licensing content has been taken out to form a brand new Copilot Studio Licensing Guide.

Find the slimmed down Power Platform Licensing Guide here: https://bit.ly/4kGJGRs, and its new friend here: https://bit.ly/43Sg5xG.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (June 2025) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide with a few changes of note.

Firstly, there are further refinements to the tables of security roles and a “menu item” – the thing you give access to via a security role – is renamed to a “securable object”.

Secondly, there are some edits to the requirements for licensing external users which aligns with the Product Terms. Note that the tables and footnotes on pages 43 and 44 haven’t really survived the editing of the last three months and now take a bit of effort to work through the errors and make sense of them.

Finally, there’s a new section for “Coplot Studio Offers in Paid Public Preview” which is light on detail but refers you to the new Copilot Studio Licensing Guide which gives a smidgen more information.

Find the latest guide here: https://bit.ly/3HEG6sI.

Windows Server virtualization licensing guidance document

There’s an updated (May 2025) Windows Server virtualization licensing document from Microsoft. There aren’t major changes from the previous version – the most significant one is the removal of all the (quite useful) diagrams. In addition, the original errors remain – the requirement for a customer to have a minimum of 16 Windows Server Core licences when licensing by virtual machine was removed in April 2023.

However, keep your Microsoft documentation stash complete by grabbing this document here: https://bit.ly/44doWLJ.

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.