Category Archives: Uncategorized

Power BI Premium

Microsoft announce Power BI Premium, a new member of the Power BI family joining Power BI Desktop and Power BI Pro. So, what’s new? Well, today, Power BI Desktop is free and it’s aimed at personal use, while Power BI Pro costs $9.99 per user per month and enables collaboration. Under the current licensing, if an organisation has a few users who publish reports and many users who consume them, then everyone needs to be licensed with a Power BI Pro licence.

Power BI Premium will be generally available late in the second quarter of 2017 and will be licensed by capacity. This means that a Power BI Pro licence will still be required for users publishing reports, but consumers will no longer need to be licensed if their organisation is covered by Power BI Premium. And how does the capacity licensing work? Well, it’s by node and luckily there’s a calculator available to work out just how many nodes you’re likely to need based on your estimated number of Pro, frequent and occasional users. Find the calculator here: http://bit.ly/2qTdPlG.

But what’s a node?! A server? An end-user endpoint? No. Properly called capacity nodes, they’re just a way of purchasing a certain number of virtual cores, memory and bandwidth, dedicated to a customer, that will be sufficient to power the required BI system. At launch, there will be three sizes – inspiringly called P1, P2 and P3 which, for example, give access to 8, 16 and 32 virtual cores. There’s a Microsoft Power BI Premium Whitepaper which gives you some more information on this and you can find it in the “Other” section of the “Application Servers” area in our Licensing Guides emporium at: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.

But that’s not the end of the story. There’s also an option for customers who want a hybrid solution and that’s possible with the new Power BI Report Server. When you purchase Power BI Premium you can use the same number of cores that you’ve purchased in the cloud with Power BI Report Server on-premises.

Find the Power BI Premium announcement here: http://bit.ly/2pXo1wt.

Microsoft Hosting and Cloud Service Provider Newsletter

The April 2017 Microsoft Hosting and Cloud Service Provider Newsletter is out. There’s just one item of licensing interest: there was a minor update to the Services Provider License Agreement on 16 April, 2017 when the definition of a Reciprocal Service Provider was included.

Sign up for this free newsletter here: http://bit.ly/2gbk5iR.

Windows 10 S

Microsoft announce Windows 10 S – a flavour of Windows 10 Pro that is, in Microsoft’s words, “optimised for security and performance”. It does this by working only with apps from the Windows Store and having Edge as its default browser. You can pay to switch to Windows 10 Pro through the Windows Store at any time, but you can’t then go back to Windows 10 S.

This FAQ gives you a good overview: http://bit.ly/2pB32Pt.

Azure StorSimple in CSP

Azure StorSimple became available through CSP in February 2017.

A reminder of what StorSimple is: a hybrid storage solution which can be deployed as a physical device or a virtual appliance, where active data is stored on-premises and cool data is pushed to the cloud.

It’s currently just the StorSimple Virtual Array that’s available through CSP and there’s an excellent article from Microsoft that explains all: http://bit.ly/2oQTnDT.

If you’ve got a particular question you may find your answer in the useful FAQ here: http://bit.ly/2oY5ayO.

April 2017 Volume Licensing Newsletter

The April 2017 Microsoft Volume Licensing Newsletter is out. Its main focus is Premium Assurance – the ability to add six extra years of product support to Windows Server and/or SQL Server.

So, if you want to find out more about Premium Assurance or access useful resources, read and subscribe to this free newsletter here: http://bit.ly/2omKXBm.