Category Archives: Uncategorized

Viva Sales in preview

Microsoft announce that Viva Sales is in preview. Viva as a brand is about improving the employee experience, and the Viva Suite is aimed at employees in any role across a business. Viva Sales is tailored to improve the employee experience for a specific role – sellers – and enables 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. In the public preview, Viva Sales will be available at no additional charge to organisations who use Microsoft 365 and Teams, and you’ll need to be licensed for Dynamics 365 to try out the full experience. Further details on licensing will be released when Viva Sales is generally available.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3bPH0TR, and a useful FAQ here: https://bit.ly/3vRZPwz.

Preview of PAYG option for Power Automate

Microsoft announce that the preview for the PAYG option for Power Automate is now available.

This means that rather than paying $15 per user every month (regardless of whether they run any flows) or $100 per flow every month (regardless of whether the flow is run), customers can choose to simply incur charges of $0.60 each time a cloud flow or attended desktop flow is run, or $3 when an unattended desktop flow is run.

As with many of the other new PAYG options, these flow consumption charges are associated with a nominated Azure Subscription.

You can find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3czvxry, a useful set of docs articles here: https://bit.ly/3SCC6u8, and the pricing page here: https://bit.ly/3ooVJb2.

Microsoft Entra update

At the end of May 2022 Microsoft introduced us to Microsoft Entra – a new product family encompassing all of Microsoft’s identity and access capabilities (https://bit.ly/3SEMXDA). There are three members of the family with Azure AD remaining the hero identity and access management product, alongside two new product categories: Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and decentralized identity.

With the acquisition of CloudKnox Security in 2021, Microsoft now offers a CIEM solution as part of Entra called Microsoft Entra Permissions Management. This was made generally available in July 2022 (https://bit.ly/3PdAF2f) and is licensed as a standalone solution costing $125 per resource per year, where supported resources are compute resources, container clusters, serverless functions, and databases across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

The decentralized identity solution, Microsoft Entra Verified ID, was made generally available in August 2022 (https://bit.ly/3SQSyae) and is included with any Azure AD subscription, including Azure AD Free. If you’re new to this notion, then there’s a nice video explaining decentralized identity here: https://bit.ly/3paTuso.

In terms of learning more, if you’re a partner, then this Inspire session (https://bit.ly/3BfNea3) is a good introduction to Entra, and of course there’s the main product page here: https://bit.ly/3P7VGLK, with links to lots more product information.

Microsoft 365 E3 – Unattended Licensing Brief

There’s an updated (June 2022) Microsoft 365 E3 – Unattended Licensing Brief. This document helps you to understand how the Microsoft 365 E3 – Unattended licence allows a bot to run repetitive tasks in a Windows client/Office app without user intervention, with a useful FAQ section at the end.

This updated version has minor changes updating it for Windows 11, and you can find it here: https://bit.ly/3QcSijt.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (August 2022) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide. The changes in this new version are minor, with the most significant being the increase of Dataverse capacity entitlements for Operations-Activity and Operations-Device licences. Page 42 is updated to show that each Operations-Activity licence now accrues an additional 64 MB of Dataverse Database capacity and 512 MB of Dataverse File capacity, while each Operations-Device licence accrues 102 MB of Dataverse Database capacity and 819 MB of Dataverse File capacity.

You can  find details of further minor changes in the Change Log on page 60, and the updated document itself here: https://bit.ly/3SkWnnz.

Updates to the Frontline Worker device rules

Microsoft adjust the rules for devices used by Frontline Workers. From 1 August 2022, Office 365 F3 and Microsoft 365 F1/F3 licences may be assigned to users who use a primary work device with a single screen smaller than 10.9″ – increased from 10.1″. 

Find notice of the update on the Product Terms site here: https://bit.ly/3prduoo.

Updates to the Home Use Program

The Home Use Program is renamed to the Workplace Discount Program, but there are no changes to the offers that are available to eligible organisations.

You can find out more about the Workplace Discount Program here: https://bit.ly/3Qb7AFx, and notice of the name change on the Product Terms site here: https://bit.ly/3prduoo.

Windows Autopatch

Microsoft announce the General Availability of Windows Autopatch – a cloud service that automates updates for Windows, Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, Edge and Teams.

It’s included with Windows 10/11 Enterprise E3/E5/VDA licences, and customers also need to be licensed for Azure Active Directory Premium and Microsoft Intune to take advantage of the service.

You can find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3vcQMWq, and a useful FAQ here: https://bit.ly/3S7o1o9.

Microsoft Defender for Business servers preview

Microsoft announce that Defender for Business servers is now in preview, offering endpoint security for Windows and Linux servers for small and medium-sized businesses. It’s free during this preview period and will then be charged at $3 per server instance per month at General Availability, when it will be available as an Add-on licence to Microsoft 365 Business Premium or Microsoft Defender for Business.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3RZ7TVO, and a useful FAQ here: https://bit.ly/3BhF3d3.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (July 2022) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide with just a couple of minor edits. Find this updated guide here: https://bit.ly/3OuG2tm.