Category Archives: Uncategorized

New Microsoft Viva offerings

Microsoft announce two new apps for Viva.

Firstly, there will be Viva Pulse to empower leaders to seek regular and confidential feedback about their team’s experience, which will sit alongside company-wide engagement tools like Glint, which itself will come to Viva next year.

Secondly, there will be Viva Amplify to help leaders to get their message across and energise their people. Both of these apps will be included within the existing Viva Suite when they’re available.

Find the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/3Twys4E, and find out more about the new apps and other new functionality in the “Viva Innovation Brochure” here: https://bit.ly/3MFc3Qg.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (October 2022) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide. The main change is for the inclusion of Viva Sales in Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licences – see our blog for more information on Viva Sales: https://bit.ly/3Dfl93j.

Other changes include confirmation that Sales Professional users are not entitled to use the Sales Hub application (page 25) and a simplification of the “Microsoft Relationship Sales solution Plus” name to “Microsoft Relationship Sales” (page 60).

Get this updated guide here: https://bit.ly/3UYisKa.

General Availability of Teams Phone Mobile

Microsoft announce the General Availability of Teams Phone Mobile, previously known as Operator Connect Mobile, which gives users a single, business-provided number for Teams and their mobile phone.

From a licensing perspective users will need to be licensed for Teams Phone and will also need to have the $0 Teams Phone Mobile Add-on licence assigned to them.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3yO1aGi.

Availability of Microsoft eCDN

Microsoft announce that Microsoft eCDN is available from 1 September, 2022. eCDN stands for Enterprise Content Delivery Network and the product is designed to enhance live video streaming across an organisation.

It’s a WebRT-based solution that leverages peer-to-peer streaming technology so that rather than every viewer of a video stream pulling the video from the original source, they can also source the video stream from other viewers within the same local network. This alleviates the overall load on the corporate network for company-wide training and global events.

Licensing-wise, it’s a User Subscription License costing $0.50 per user per month with the recommendation being that all users in a tenant are licensed for optimal experience.

Find the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/3CzC0fu.

Changes to Teams Rooms licensing

Microsoft update the licensing for Teams Rooms from 1 September, 2022. Previously there were Teams Rooms Standard and Teams Rooms Premium licences costing $15 and $50 per device per month respectively, with the biggest difference between the SKUs being the Microsoft managed services element.

Now there’s a choice of Teams Rooms Basic or Teams Rooms Pro. Teams Rooms Basic is a free SKU, with a basic set of features, which customers can use for up to 25 devices. Teams Rooms Pro is $40 per room per month with the whole feature set including support for Teams Panels and dual screens. Note also that the Microsoft managed services element is being removed to enable partners to provide complete services around meeting room management, supported by AI services.

For more details, and links to further information, this Microsoft blog post is a great place to start: https://bit.ly/3BjtJeS. If you want a summary of the latest Teams Rooms hardware innovation, then this is a useful page: https://bit.ly/3CKVKwW, and there’s a note at the bottom indicating that there’ll be a further Teams Shared Device licence in a few months to cover certain use cases on Teams Displays and Teams Panels.

Azure Hybrid Benefit for Azure Stack HCI

Microsoft introduce a new benefit for customers with Windows Server Datacenter licences with SA purchased through an Enterprise Agreement. It’s an extension to the Azure Hybrid Benefit and waives the fees for the Azure Stack HCI host service and Windows Server guest subscriptions, as long as all physical cores of the Azure Stack HCI cluster are licensed with Windows Server Datacenter Core licences.

You can find the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/3S4ldHf, and this is a good place to find out more, such as how the benefit is activated: https://bit.ly/3yOX54F.

Licensing Windows Server for use with virtualization technologies

There’s an updated (October 2022) Microsoft Licensing Brief to detail the licensing of Windows Server for use with virtualisation technologies.

This document is updated for the new per virtual machine licensing model for Windows Server, so if you’re pondering how containers are licensed, how Windows Server licensing changes with VMware or Virtuozzo, or how you license Windows Server for use on Microsoft Azure, you’ll find this useful document here: https://bit.ly/3SSzfMJ.

Azure savings plan for compute

Microsoft announce the Azure savings plan for compute. This enables customers to take advantage of better pricing across a range of Azure compute services by committing to spend a fixed hourly amount for one or three years. Once the plan is purchased the lower prices are automatically applied to eligible services across all Azure regions. However, Reserved Instances still offer the best prices for customers who are committed to a specific VM family in a specific region.

As a comparison, a D8s v4 VM running in the East US data centre has a PAYG price of $0.7520 per hour, a 1-year RI price of $0.5938 per hour (21% savings), and a 1-year savings plan price of $0.6314 (16% savings).

This is a useful page to get started on the Azure savings plan for compute: https://bit.ly/3gipyJp, and this is where you’ll find the detail on how to buy a plan and how discounts are applied etc: https://bit.ly/3VDy1XO.

General Availability of Viva Sales

Microsoft announce that Viva Sales is generally available as of 3 October, 2022. Viva as a brand is about improving the employee experience, with the Viva Suite aimed at employees in any role across a business.

Viva Sales, however, is tailored to improve the employee experience for a specific role – sellers – and it enables these users to use Office 365 and Teams to automatically capture, access and register data into a CRM system, eliminating the administrative burden of manual data entry.

Viva Sales is included in Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licences, and is also available as a standalone licence priced at $40 per user per month.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3fZC28I, with links to other useful resources such as pricing information and an “Introduction to Viva Sales” course on Microsoft Learn.

Microsoft Teams Premium

Microsoft announce Teams Premium, which will be in Public Preview in December and generally available in February 2023. It will be licensed via an add-on to Teams with an expected price of $10 per user per month.

In terms of functionality, expect AI features such as intelligent recaps to summarise meetings with actions, and live translation for captions, as well as options for keeping confidential meetings confidential, help in streamlining registration workflows, and the availability of rich analytics.

The announcement article, which you can find here: https://bit.ly/3yJGhfi, has a lot of additional information on the feature set, and this second article is useful for comparing the features existing Office 365/Microsoft 365 customers will have access to, compared to the additional Teams Premium licence: https://bit.ly/3VzqYzm.