Category Archives: Uncategorized

Enhanced CSP track in GLR

CSP CSP track on GLR Enhanced CSP track in GLR

The Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) track in Get Licensing Ready has been enhanced and extended to contain the following modules:

  • Introduction to CSP
  • Licensing Online Services in CSP
  • Licensing Azure Services in CSP
  • Licensing Virtual Machines in CSP
  • Comparing CSP to other Programs: Azure

Each module has the usual video, handout and test so it’s an ideal way to learn the essentials of licensing in CSP, with a certificate awarded at the end.

Find the track in the English portal here: http://bit.ly/2Oib269.

Azure Lighthouse

Microsoft announce the General Availability of Azure Lighthouse (http://bit.ly/2XXR45e) on 11 July, 2019. This tool is primarily aimed at Service Providers who manage Azure resources across a number of customer tenants, but it’s also useful for customers who need to manage their own resources across multiple tenants. Typically, in order to manage Azure resources for a customer, a Service Provider has to sign in to the Azure Management portal using an account associated with that customer’s tenant, and if there are tasks to be done across multiple customer tenants, it’s a time-consuming process accessing each customer’s tenant separately.

Azure Lighthouse makes use of the Azure delegated resource management capability which, through a logical projection of customer resources onto a Service Provider’s tenant context, gives that partner a single control plane to view and manage Azure resources across all of their customers. Even better, it works across the different ways that a customer may have purchased Azure such as through an EA, CSP or directly from Azure.com. The service is free to use, and customers can be onboarded to Azure delegated resource management either by using Azure Resource Manager templates or by publishing a private or public Managed Services offer to the Azure Marketplace.

To find out more, tackle these resources in order:

  • Introducing managed services offers in Azure Marketplace – 20-minute session from Inspire: http://bit.ly/2M6BGMI
  • Azure Lighthouse: Shifting the managed services paradigm towards greater efficiency and security – 1-hour session from Inspire: http://bit.ly/2YmBXl9
  • Azure Lighthouse documentation: http://bit.ly/2Y04Zrf

Microsoft Teams Trial in CSP.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft announce at Inspire that they’re launching a trial of Teams in CSP from 1st August, 2019. It’s aimed at customers who have yet to see the value of the cloud, or who are perhaps using a standalone service such as Exchange Online.

Watch the 20-minute session that covers this new offer here: http://bit.ly/2Z9s0o6, with this particular slide at 13:13.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (July 2019) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide with two main changes. Firstly, the addition of the Customer Service Chat Add-on – a User SL which is added on to the Customer Service Enterprise User SL to help agents engage in real-time with customers to resolve issues faster. And secondly, the addition of Forms Pro – a product that enables organisations to collect feedback from customers and employees and to gain actionable insights from the results. It’s licensed per tenant and many Dynamics 365 licences include 2,000 survey responses per month. Check out our blog post for the full Forms Pro licensing story: http://bit.ly/2Sgaqwb.

Find this Licensing Guide here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.

Forms Pro Generally Available

Microsoft announce the General Availability of Forms Pro from 1st July 2019, a product that enables organisations to collect feedback from customers and employees and to gain actionable insights from the results. Find the announcement here: http://bit.ly/2xDCgsR.

From a licensing perspective, Forms Pro with 2,000 survey responses per tenant per month is included for Dynamics 365 customers with the following licences:

  • Dynamics 365 Plan
  • Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Plan
  • Dynamics 365 Unified Operations Plan
  • Dynamics 365 for Sales Enterprise
  • Dynamics 365 for Customer Server Enterprise
  • Dynamics 365 for Field Service
  • Dynamics 365 for Marketing
  • Dynamics 365 for Talent
  • Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation

Additionally, there’s a pack of 2,000 survey responses available to purchase for $100 per tenant per month. This is suitable for the above customers who want to add extra survey responses, or for other Dynamics 365 customers who don’t have any of these qualifying licences, or for Office 365 customers who want to upgrade from the included not-as-full-featured Office 365 Forms product. Find this information here: http://bit.ly/2XvYaJ7.

And finally, with the release of Forms Pro, Microsoft announce the deprecation of the Voice of the Customer product. Existing customers will be able to create new surveys up until 1st July 2020, and after that survey data will be available and stored in Dynamics 365. Find further information here: http://bit.ly/30lEoSa.

Tenant Level Services Licensing Guidance

Some Microsoft online services are tenant-level services which means that when they’re purchased for any user in a tenant they’re activated for all users in that tenant. This gives a bit of a licensing challenge because even though, as you’d expect, any user who needs to use the service needs to be licensed, some unlicensed users may technically be able to access the service without a licence. So, to help out, Microsoft have released some new documentation which covers all of the tenant-level services and for each of them details which users benefit from the service, how the users benefit from the service, how the service is provisioned, and how the service can be applied only to users in the tenant who are licensed for the service.

Find this very useful information here: http://bit.ly/30lGJN0.

Dynamics 365 Business Central Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (July 2019) Dynamics 365 Business Central Licensing Guide. The major change is the addition of a new Device Subscription Licence which allows any number of users to use Business Central via a licensed device. It’s important to note that the Device SL gives access to a subset of Business Central capabilities which are detailed on page 8.

Find this guide with hundreds of its Licensing Guide friends here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (June 2019) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide. Perhaps the most interesting information is on page 2 where we get some details on upcoming releases (Customer Service Chat, Forms Pro, and Call Intelligence), a name change (AI for Sales becomes Sales Insight), and a new segment (DoD).

These changes are all expected in July or August. There are also amendments for default capacities throughout, the most important one being confirmation that Sales/Customer Service Professional licences do not count towards the 10 licence minimum for the Dynamics 365 Portal.

As usual, consult the Change Log for extra clarity and find the document itself here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.

Update on Microsoft Reservations

Microsoft Reservations are a way of pre-paying for certain Azure services to get the best possible pricing. The first Reservation from Microsoft was a Reserved Instance – a way of paying upfront for the compute part of a virtual machine – and Microsoft continues to extend what, and where, Reservations are available.

In February 2019, Microsoft announced that Reserved Instance discounts had been extended to apply both to Classic Virtual Machines and Cloud Services, and that Reserved Instances could be applied to Dev/Test Subscriptions acquired through an Enterprise Agreement or through Azure.com. Find that announcement here: http://bit.ly/2KEIVdP.

More recently, in April 2019, they announced that the Reservations family had grown to include two new members. Firstly,

SQL Data Warehouse Reserved Capacity allows customers to buy compute Data Warehouse Units (cDWU) with either 1-year or 3-year options for discounts of up to 65%. Reserved Capacity can be shared by multiple warehouses in the same region and there are exchange and cancel options available if business needs change. Secondly, there are new RedHat Enterprise Linux Software Plans where the rules are stricter in terms of exchanging and cancelling, but discounts of up to 18% are still available.

Find the announcement and get further details here: http://bit.ly/2Mzvq1D.

Dynamics 365 Business Central Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (June 2019) Dynamics 365 Business Central Licensing Guide. There are just a couple of minor changes: links to the document that gives more information on how Team Members licences work in Business Central is moved to the Dynamics 365 Licensing FAQ, and there’s a new appendix added listing configuration components. Find this guide here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.