There will be a new “Stakeholder” licence available for Visual Studio Online accounts from mid-August. This free licence will give access to a restricted feature set and there will be an unlimited number of Stakeholder users allowed.
Read the full Microsoft article here (http://bit.ly/1m7zj4a) and get the heads up on other changes to Visual Studio licensing that may come to pass.
Office 365 plans for SMB customers: look out for some new plans & some changes to existing ones. 3 new Office 365 plans launch on 1 Oct 2014 – O365 Business (Office apps & OneDrive), O365 Business Essentials (cloud services & OneDrive), and O365 Business Premium (everything above). Changes include increasing the 25 user limit to 300 from 1 Oct 2014 for O365 Small Business/Small Business Premium plan customers, & reducing the price of the Midsize plan for new customers from 1 Aug 2014.
The full Microsoft article is here http://bit.ly/1sPhexj with some useful diagrams & information on migration.
Azure is available through the Open Volume Licensing programs from 1 August 2014. If you’re a partner needing to get up to speed then visit aka.ms/AzureVAR to access a Partner Licensing Deck, a Reseller Deck, a Partner FAQ, and a Partner Datasheet.
When don’t you need to assign Office 365 licences to mailboxes? When they’re non-user mailboxes of course. But when DO you need to assign licences to these non-user mailboxes?
If a resource, room, or shared mailbox goes over its quota of 10GB then it needs a licence, and if one isn’t assigned after one month, the mailbox will be locked.
The recommendation is to use archiving to avoid going over the quota: http://bit.ly/1qBZPrh.
RIP OLSUR! From 1 July 2014 the Online Services Use Rights (OLSUR) will be replaced by the Online Services Terms (OST).
Download the July 2014 edition of the OST (http://bit.ly/msost) or wait for our summary of the changes for this quarter.
There’s a new (May 2014) BizTalk Server 2013 R2 Licensing Datasheet and FAQ. There are no changes to the licensing, but the updated datasheet adds in the Developer edition, has a (quite useful) table to compare editions, and includes a new FAQ right at the end which details the licensing limitations of BizTalk Branch edition.
Get it here: http://bit.ly/UR1LBt.
There’s really not much new in the June 2014 Product List which, although disappointing in terms of excitement levels, is a bit of a relief in our ever-changing licensing world.
Products added
Extra clarification
Wording added to the June 2014 Product List confirms that organisations with certain Office 365 subscriptions under an OVS agreement may continue to use copies of Office Standard/Professional Plus which were licensed through their OVS for up to 180 days after the agreement has expired.
See the new “Open Value Subscription migration period” section on page 47.
There are several different ways you can buy Azure as a customer. Want to see if your knowledge is up to scratch? We’ve got some more tests – the short one (http://bit.ly/Tly7mp) or the proper roll-up-your-sleeves-and-have-a-go one (http://bit.ly/LS-Azure-Test).
This is a useful presentation detailing the licensing of lots of different hosting scenarios. Partner Hosting is the main focus and there are slides on dedicated hosting, hybrid hosting, and shared hosting.
Everything is scenario-based and you’ll find examples with Licence Mobility through SA, the RDS User CAL Extended Rights, and the more mind-bending multiple-partner SPLA situations.
There’s also a section on some options for Volume Licensing customers who want to license external users for web workloads or self-hosted ISV applications. http://bit.ly/1lrQUYV.