There’s a new Azure Cost Management course for Microsoft partners available on Microsoft Learn, the free online training platform. Topics covered include cost management scopes, bill reconciliation, Partner Earned Credit, enabling cost management for customers, and setting budgets and alerts.
Find this course here: https://bit.ly/3j8FTwW.
Today, organisations using Power BI need to license all users who publish shared content with Power BI Pro licences, and then choose to license the consumers of that content with further Power BI Pro licences or subscribe to Power BI Premium which is licensed on a capacity basis.
At the September 2020 Ignite conference Microsoft announced a new Power BI Premium per user licensing option. This will include all the features of Power BI Pro as well as other capabilities only available in Premium today.Â
The public preview is planned to start in early November 2020 when the licence will be free, and GA is expected in Spring 2021 at a price to be announced.
Find a useful article on this new licensing option here: https://bit.ly/3j1YNWc and sign up to receive more information here: https://bit.ly/3379VvH.
Microsoft announce two new promotional offers for Microsoft Teams, currently available for EA customers with existing paid-for Teams licences.
The first offer is free Audio Conferencing licences until the end of the enrolment, and the second is a 35% discount on the new Advanced Communications offering. Both offers are available until 31 January, 2021.
There will be corresponding offers available through CSP and Web Direct later in the year.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/33NIFkN.
Microsoft announce that an AWS connector for Azure Cost Management is available from 1 September, 2020 for all customers.
This connector enables customers to analyse their Azure and AWS spend from a single pane of glass in the Azure Management Portal. There’s no cost for the connector for the first 90 days, and thereafter Cost Management for AWS is charged at 1% of the total AWS managed spend.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/32P0HE5, along with instructions for setting up and using the connector.
We found a March 2020 update to the Visual Studio Licensing Guide. There aren’t any major changes, but if you always like to have the latest version to hand, then you can find it here: https://bit.ly/2EQ9SdQ.
There’s an updated (September 2020) Dynamics 365 Mixed Reality Licensing Guide. Changes include information added about default capacities, and the updating of information and links to the Mixed Reality free trials.
Find this latest guide here: https://bit.ly/2Fak0ym.
Azure Advisor helps customers to optimise their Azure deployments by analysing resource configuration and usage telemetry and then recommending solutions that can help improve (among other areas) the cost effectiveness of Azure resources.
There are recent enhancements to Azure Advisor including new right-size recommendations for underutilised MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL database server resources, and new Reservation recommendations for services such as Cosmos DB, SQL PaaS, Blog storage and Synapse analytics.
There’s also a new Quick Fix feature available which allows users to remediate recommendations for multiple resources simultaneously.
Find the two announcements covering these new enhancements here: https://bit.ly/2YxOUYc and here: https://bit.ly/3aU8l2k.
Microsoft announce that Advanced Communications is available from August 1, 2020.
This adds a new set of capabilities for Teams, costs $12 per user per month and may be added on to any licence that includes the Teams service.
It supports large meetings enhancing the standard Teams limits from 10,000 to 20,000 attendees, 15 to 50 concurrent events, and event durations from 4 to 16 hours. Note that these limits are already uplifted for all Teams users until 1 October, 2020 – find details of that here: https://bit.ly/3lf2fON.
It also supports integration with ISV compliance recording and contact centre solutions, and will support custom branded meeting lobbies in the near future.
Find details of what’s included here: https://bit.ly/31r24b8, the announcement itself here: https://bit.ly/3hsYl2l, and a useful FAQ here: https://bit.ly/34vzoQr.
Microsoft expand the capability for end users to purchase licences on their organisation’s tenant without going through the IT department.
From 15 September, 2020 users will be able to purchase Visio Plan 1 and Plan 2, and Project Plan 1 and Plan 3, as well as the currently available Power Apps per user, Power Automate per user and Power BI Pro products.
IT administrators can see any licences that have been purchased in this way through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and can turn off self-service purchase on a product by product basis using PowerShell – find instructions here: https://bit.ly/2Eum8Am.
There’s also a useful FAQ to get an overview of the processes from both the end users’ and the IT administrators’ perspective here: http://bit.ly/2T034Pe.
There’s an updated (August 2020) Dynamics 365 Business Central Licensing Guide.
The main change is additional clarification for the use of customisation when applied to Team Members scenarios.
Check out the Change Log on page 14 for details of the changes, and find the updated guide here: https://bit.ly/2DFopZC.