The Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux allows you to bring your existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) subscriptions to Azure, so that you only pay for the infrastructure costs of the VM on Azure.
If you don’t know much about how this benefit gets activated for Linux VMs then we’d recommend this splendid interactive demo from Microsoft: https://bit.ly/3JBNUwU.
Copilot Credits are the currency of Agent consumption for many Agents in the Microsoft world. Previously you’ve been able to purchase a Capacity Pack which gives you 25,000 Copilot Credits for $200 a month, or purchase on a Pay-As-You-Go basis at $0.01 per Copilot Credit. Now there’s a third option – a Pre-Purchase Plan – where you can buy large amounts of Copilot Credits (300,000 upwards) that you can use at any time during the next year, jolly handy, of course, for seasonal spikes. As you might expect, there are discounts available the more Copilot Credits you purchase, and in fact there are 9 different tiers with discounts ranging from 5% to 20% compared to the PAYG pricing.
Find the announcement article with a sample scenario and the full discount tier table here: https://bit.ly/4ny4AmS.
Microsoft announce that from April 1, 2026, a new option called the Extended Service Term (EST) will be available when CSP subscriptions expire. Customers currently have the choice to renew automatically, and if they don’t, the subscription goes into a grace period, meaning no loss of service. From April 1, 2026, the grace period will no longer exist. Instead, the options will be to either renew automatically, cancel at expiry, or leave auto-renew off and move to EST. When the subscription is in the EST a new SKU is used, and service continues – billed at an uplifted rate. EST allows customers to maintain access to their services while they decide their next steps, at which point they have flexibility to take another route.
An overview of the details and a useful timeline can be found here: https://bit.ly/47KgLIz.
Microsoft’s AI-powered content management services have been renamed from Microsoft Syntex to Document Processing for Microsoft 365. Supplementing SharePoint, the features and functionality remain the same as before, with the billing still tied to a pay-as-you-go Subscription in Azure. Interestingly, if you have this billing mechanism set up, there’s a limited amount of included capacity allowing you to try the services for free, until December 2025.
Discover the details of Document Processing here: https://bit.ly/4o1NHSy, with pricing information on this link: https://bit.ly/4qERUxx.
The Modern Work Plan Comparison documents are available for October 2025, with separate PDFs for the Enterprise, SMB, US Government, and Education sectors. Be cautious with the Education page, however! It shows that the new Microsoft Purview Suite and Microsoft Defender Suite can be added onto Office 365 A1, even though the Product Terms state you need A3 or higher as a qualifying plan. We’ve started documenting these kinds of errors in the “Licensing Guide cautionary notes” section of LicenseVerse, so do keep an eye on that page for these useful insights. In the meantime, you’ll find the documents here: https://bit.ly/4hn2hS2. If you’re a partner, we have an Excel version of these files.
Drop us an email on info@licensingschool.co.uk from your work email address and we’ll send it on.
Viva is Microsoft’s Employee Experience Platform (EXP) and features two complementary offerings which no longer require separate purchases. Viva Pulse helps managers and team leaders gauge and react to team sentiment via anonymous surveys, while Viva Glint differs by focusing on understanding company-wide feedback and then assisting with implementing strategic change. These offerings were traditionally sold as individual User SLs or as part of the Viva Suite, but now, a Viva Glint licence automatically includes Viva Pulse. This close integration means management teams can directly follow up a Viva Glint engagement survey with their specific team, enabling more focused and tailored Pulse feedback, as well as other integration features.
You can read the details here: https://bit.ly/4njvZsE.
There’s a new feature in Exchange Online that automatically archives the oldest items in your mailbox after it reaches 96% of its quota. This goes hand in hand with the current time-based archiving and avoids any email disruption that could be caused by hitting mailbox limits due to big attachments or large volumes of AI-generated content. Exchange Online Plan 1 and Plan 2 will continue to offer a 50 GB and 100 GB archive mailbox respectively. This feature is currently in private preview for selected customers, will be in public preview from 15 November, 2025, and generally available in January 2026.
There are some useful FAQs and details of the announcement here: https://bit.ly/43nKeFC.
There’s an updated (May 2025) Microsoft 365 – Unattended License Overview Licensing Guidance. If you haven’t come across this document before, it’s got some useful information on how you license a bot to run repetitive tasks in a Windows client or Microsoft 365 App without user intervention. The updates are slightly odd – references to Windows 11 are removed in favour of Windows 10, and it’s not yet updated for the “new” Power Automate licences introduced in August 2023. We’ve got a new section in LicenseVerse – Licensing Guides Cautionary Notes – to keep you informed of errors like this in current Microsoft Licensing Guides.
Help yourself to this May 2025 document here: https://bit.ly/4nDXHBb.
If you’re rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot you might find the Copilot License Details Diagnostic useful. Released in August 2025 it validates whether users are properly licensed to access Microsoft 365 Copilot by performing a series of checks.
Find out more in this article: https://bit.ly/3JVPHwA.
The Azure SRE Agent is designed to streamline incident response, improve service uptime, and cut operational costs, allowing Site Reliability Engineers to focus on higher-value tasks. Why’s it interesting from a licensing perspective? It’s the first Azure-hosted autonomous Agent that’s billed via a new measure – Azure Agent Units or AAUs. The Azure SRE Agent continuously monitors in the background incurring charges of 4 AAUs an hour and then, when issues are detected, billing is 0.25 of an AAU for every second the Agent is engaged on a task.
Find a good article with some example billing scenarios here: https://bit.ly/47utIGS.