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.
There’s an updated (August 2020) Power Apps Licensing Guide.
The main change is clarification that the Power Apps per app/per user licences do not include RPA functionality for which a separate purchase of Power Automate per user with attended RPA plan is required.
As usual, find the details of all of the changes in the Change Log on page 24, and get the updated guide itself here: https://bit.ly/3kumMyF.
There’s an updated (August 2020) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide with two main changes.
The first is for the rebranding of Forms Pro to Dynamics 365 Customer Voice – find more info on our blog here: https://bit.ly/3abDtu0 – and the second is for the release of the new Dynamics 365 Sales Premium bundle, an offer combining Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Dynamics 365 Sales Insights at a price of $135 per user per month, a saving of $10 over buying the applications separately.
Find the updated Licensing Guide here: https://bit.ly/33L0IK4.