There’s an updated (December 2016) Enterprise Agreement Program Guide which has primarily been adjusted for the renaming of Enterprise Cloud Suite to Secure Productive Enterprise.
Find this updated guide here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
System Center
The System Center 2016 Client Management Suite is removed from the January 2017 Product Terms document, and now each of its four components are licensed separately with CMLs per User or per OSE.
The four components are Data Protection Manager, Operations Manager, Orchestrator, and Service Manager and active SA on a Client Management Suite licence at 1 January 2017 makes you eligible for all four licences.
See page 6 of the Product Terms for an overview.
January 2017 Product Name Changes
The January 2017 Product Terms document alerts us to some product name changes: Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery becomes Office 365 Advanced Compliance, and Operations Management Suite changes to Operations Management and Security – it’s all on page 5.
Dynamics 365 (On-premises) Licensing Guide
The Dynamics 365 (On-premises) Licensing Guide is available.
It’s got useful information on the new offerings available, as well as upgrade and downgrade paths, and how you can transition to the cloud. As usual, find this guide at http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
Visual Studio TFS and Team Services
In November 2016 there were changes made to release management licensing in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and Team Services.
If you want to understand how concurrent pipelines are licensed (and indeed what they are!) then these are some good resources: a video – http://bit.ly/2j1rMKt, and blog entries for TFS – http://bit.ly/2iweV67 and TS – http://bit.ly/2j5CPGn.
Cloud Service Provider Newsletter
The November 2016 Hosting and Cloud Service Provider Newsletter is out.
There are two main items of licensing interest: firstly, BizTalk Server 2016 launched in SPLA in December with the only licensing change being that the Core Factor table is no longer required.
Then there’s news of the quarterly SPLA licensing webcast on 14 December 2016 – use this link to add it to your calendar: http://bit.ly/2h3pVEI.
Sign up for this free newsletter here: http://bit.ly/2gbk5iR.
Premium Assurance
Microsoft announce Premium Assurance on 8 December 2016 (http://bit.ly/2hxi0ix) which is a way of adding six more years of product support for either Windows Server or SQL Server.
There’s a useful datasheet which gives more details, but here are the highlights: you need SA to be able to purchase Premium Assurance, and you must purchase it for ALL servers with active SA in an EA, EES or SCE. You also need to acquire Premium Assurance for a product before it goes out of support, and the price will go up over the next few years – from March 2017 it will be 5% of the licence cost rising to 12% from July 2019.
You can find the datasheet in the Core Infrastructure section in our Licensing Guides emporium: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
SCE Guide
There’s an updated (October 2016) Server and Cloud Enrolment Program Guide which includes two useful amendments. Firstly it’s updated for the release of Windows Server/System Center 2016 which changes the minimum for the Core Infrastructure Server Suites to 400 Core licences. Then there are some updates to the rules around acquiring Azure through an SCE: first of all the 5% discount that was available until October has been removed, and secondly the minimum Monetary Commitment when Azure is the only component is now 10 units per month.
Find this guide here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
Dynamics NAV 2017 Available
Microsoft announce that Dynamics NAV 2017 is available worldwide on 28 October 2016.
Find the Microsoft blog post with an overview of what’s new here: http://bit.ly/2eemayB.
Updated Windows 10 Licensing Guide
There’s an updated (November 2016) Windows 10 Licensing Guide which just makes a few corrections regarding Windows 10 Education offerings.
Get the latest guide here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.