Microsoft Azure is available through the Open Volume Licensing programs from 1st August 2014. If you’re interested in knowing more about how it will all work, then there are some Microsoft calls for both customers and partners on 13th August 2014
For more details and to register: http://bit.ly/1pyHjhO.
So, the retirement of Select Plus has been announced (Microsoft post – http://bit.ly/1k5EWp7) and MPSA is set to take over as the licensing program of choice for customers with 250 PCs who need a transactional agreement.
Today (July 2014) Software Assurance isn’t available in the MPSA but that’s all about to change and it WILL be available from 1 September 2014 (Microsoft post – http://bit.ly/1yLT61N).
This slide from WPC shows some other key milestones on the roadmap with Government and Academic offerings arriving in the March 2015 timeframe and Enterprise offerings sometime in Q1 of FY16.
Update from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference: Select Plus is to be retired.
Key dates: 1 July 2015 – Select Plus is no longer available for new agreements, and 1 July 2016 – no new purchases can be made on existing Select Plus agreements after the next agreement anniversary
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