Essential Licensing Questions…

I wonder if you saw our social media posts just before Christmas? We had a bit of Christmas fun with licensing (yes really!) and some days we challenged you to pick out the real Microsoft products from a list and to tell us how they were licensed – my favourite of all time has to be Visual Studio LightSwitch – licensed of course per developer. Other days we offered sage pieces of perhaps forgotten licensing lore – how on earth do you remember that with SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, Licence Mobility was included with the server licence rather than as an SA benefit? And sometimes we asked you how good your knowledge of previous versions was, and of course we picked that oft-renamed product Skype for Business Server aka Lync Server, or Office Communications Server, or even further back as Live Communications Server.

It was fun and we gave away lots of prizes, but what was the point?!

Well, as licensing gets more and more complicated and there’s more and more to remember we’ve realised that there’s a need for a set of reference books where you can quickly and easily look up answers to licensing questions. It’s the sort of question that you know must be answered in the old Product Lists somewhere but you’re time pressured and you just want the answer NOW. As an example, let’s say you’re doing/preparing for an audit and you come across Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC licences with SA – now what was the grant for Windows Server 2012???

We’re very pleased to announce that throughout 2016 we’ll be releasing a new range of books entitled “Essential Licensing Questions” which will, of course, include the answers(!) as well as the official Microsoft place you can go to to extract the full text if you need it. Now, if you’re wondering about the question I posed above… For every two Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC licences with active SA, a customer was granted one Windows Server 2012 Standard Processor-based licence and you’d go to page 163 of the September 2012 Product List to confirm it.

We’re expecting the first book – Essential Licensing Questions on Windows Server – to be released in January 2016, so watch out to see how you can be involved. At this point we’d love to hear from you if you want to be a reviewer for this first book – just email info@licensingschool.co.uk and we’ll send you a book as soon as it’s available.

Exciting times!

Microsoft Hosting and CSP Newsletter

The December 2015 Hosting and Cloud Service Provider newsletter is out.

It’s got links to recent topics of interest in the hosting world: the launch of E5, licensing changes for Windows Server and System Center 2016, and the changes to Licence Mobility for SA rights which allow customers to fail-over to shared hardware.

There are also links to useful CSP resources and the next quarterly licensing webcast on 20 January, 2016.

Sign up for this free newsletter here: http://bit.ly/1iVEvxV.

Skype for Business Online Licensing Overview

Skype for Business Online Licensing OverviewSkype for Business Online has some key new components: Meeting Broadcast, Cloud PBX, PSTN Conferencing, and PSTN Calling.

If you want a summary of how to license these individual components and what to purchase if you’re already licensed for an Office 365 plan, then Microsoft’s Skype for Business Online Licensing Overview page is a good resource: http://bit.ly/1UmbTup.

This page also has some great links if you want a bit more detail on the new components themselves. Worth a look!

Microsoft Volume Licensing Newsletter – December 2015

The Microsoft Volume Licensing Newsletter for December 2015 is released, with a focus on Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics.

There’s confirmation of the licensing model (CML) and its availability as a standalone licence or included in some suites (Enterprise CAL, EMS, ECS) where customers with active subscriptions/SA get rights to ATA from 1 August 2015.

There’s also a link to a (surprisingly!) useful ATA FAQ page and don’t forget you can find the ATA Licensing Datasheet with all of the other Microsoft Licensing Guides here in the Core Infrastructure section: http://bit.ly/MSlicensingguides.

Read the newsletter and sign up for future issues here: http://bit.ly/1SPW0N8.

CRM Server 2016 Licensing Guide

There’s a refreshed (December 2015) Licensing Guide for CRM Server 2016, so here’s a summary of the changes:

  • Inclusion of the new Employee Self-Service USL: this is the fifth CRM Online USL with the lowest level of access, aimed at users who need to do basic tasks such as read Knowledgebase articles and submit cases, and it’s included in this guide since it gives access to an on-premises CRM deployment too (page 9)
  • Inclusion of the CRM Online Professional Add-on to Office 365 USL for SA: this offers access to the CRM Online Professional set of capabilities for users who are already licensed with Office 365 E3, E4, E5, Business Premium or ECS and the on-premises CRM Professional CAL with SA (page 19)
  • Removal of EA transitions for customers with on-premises CRM licences: the recommendation is now to purchase the relevant CRM Online For SA Add-on (page 20)
  • Extra detail about purchasing CRM 2016 under SPLA: there’s an overview of how SPLA deployments differ to an on-premises deployment and a list of available SALs (pages 16/17)
  • Inclusion of Interactive Service Hub: this facility is aimed at users in customer service roles helping them to pull together all customer interactions, and access is included in the CRM Server 2016 Basic and Professional CALs (page 12)
  • There’s also a note about the recent acquisitions of FieldOne, Adxstudio, and Fantasy Sales Team (FST) and the fact that their capabilities are not available through Volume Licensing agreements at the moment (page 12)

You can find this guide in the Dynamics section of our Licensing Guides emporium: http://bit.ly/MSlicensingguides.

December 2015 Software Dependency Guide

The Microsoft Software Dependency Guide is updated for December 2015.

This very useful guide gives a list of Microsoft software and the associated dependent Microsoft software licences that are required to use that software: for instance if you install Project Server 2013 then users also need to be licensed for Windows Server, SharePoint Server and SQL Server.

This guide is completely up to date with all of the 2016 versions of software listed and new products such as Advanced Threat Analytics 2016 added.

Find the guide here: http://bit.ly/1gzegI9.

Windows 10 Branches and SA

What Windows Branch are you entitled to if you don’t renew the Software Assurance on Windows 10?

Page 42 of the December 2015 Product Terms confirms that customers must uninstall Windows 10 Enterprise Current Branch, but if they have perpetual rights to Windows Enterprise then they may install the Long Term Servicing Branch version that was current at the time the SA ended.

Office 365 plans in the MPSA

E5 is the new Office 365 plan which arrived in December 2015 and it’s available through commercial and government Volume Licensing programs. This includes the MPSA – but what product pool is it in? Servers? Applications? Half and half? The December 2015 Product Terms is updated to remove the ambiguity around this question and you can see it’s the Applications pool on page 58.

Product Pools

CRM Online Licensing Guide

The CRM 2016 refresh happened at the end of November 2015 and that means that we have a new December 2015 Licensing Guide for CRM Online. Here’s a summary of the changes:

  • Inclusion of the new Employee Self-Service USL: this is the fifth CRM Online USL with the lowest level of access, aimed at users who need to do basic tasks such as read Knowledgebase articles and submit cases (page 8)
  • Inclusion of the CRM Online Professional Add-on to Office 365: this offers access to the CRM Online Professional set of capabilities for users who are already licensed with Office 365 E3, E4, E5, Business Premium or ECS (page 8). There’s also a “For SA” flavour of the Add-on for users who have the on-premises CRM Professional CAL with SA (page 26)
  • Removal of EA transitions for customers with on-premises CRM licences: the recommendation is now to purchase the relevant For SA Add-on (page 27)
  • Inclusion of Mobile Marketing: this new capability enables organisations to deliver marketing messages to their customers via SMS and is licensed through an Add-on to CRM Online Enterprise or Dynamics Marketing Enterprise (pages 11 and 17)
  • Inclusion of Interactive Service Hub: this facility is aimed at users in customer service roles helping them to pull together all customer interactions, and access is included in the CRM Online Basic and higher USLs and CRM Server 2016 Basic and Professional CALs (page12)
  • There’s also a note about the recent acquisitions of FieldOne, Adxstudio, and Fantasy Sales Team (FST) and the fact that their capabilities are not available through Volume Licensing agreements at the moment (page 12)

 

You can find this guide in the Dynamics section of our Licensing Guides emporium: http://bit.ly/MSlicensingguides.

System Center 2016 Licensing Guide

There’s a new System Center 2016 Licensing Guide from Microsoft.

It confirms that the licensing model will be the same as Windows Server 2016, so it’s gone to Core licensing with a minimum of 8 Core licences for each physical processor and a minimum of 16 Core licences for each server.

Read the guide to find out comparative pricing information and what organisations should do at SA renewal when they come to convert from Processor to Core licences.

You can find it here amongst the other Microsoft Licensing Guides we’ve gathered together: http://bit.ly/1RBEc9q.