There’s an updated (October 2020) Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises Licensing Guide.
The most major change is perhaps from a reformatting perspective – there has been a bit of reordering of the content and there’s a new front cover.
In addition, there are some tables added to the list for Team Members in Appendix A.
Find this updated guide here: https://bit.ly/35THbGM.
Microsoft announce the General Availability of the Azure VMware solution enabling customers to seamlessly move VMware-based workloads from their data centres to Azure and integrate their VMware environment with Azure.
What’s interesting from a licensing perspective is that if customers are running Windows Server and SQL Server workloads then they can use the Azure Hybrid Benefit to reuse existing on-premises licences, and they can also save money on the infrastructure by purchasing Reserved Instances.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/34IRm1H, and information on the solution itself here: https://bit.ly/3ow1DWH.
Microsoft announce a further extension to the Azure Hybrid Benefit, this time for Linux virtual machines.
Now customers can bring their own Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions to a virtual machine in Azure and just pay for the infrastructure charges.
Customers can apply this Azure Hybrid Benefit to either existing or new virtual machines.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/35J8F1H, and instructions on participating in the preview for this new benefit here: https://bit.ly/2Tqh4S5.
We found an updated (August 2020) Licensing Guide.
There aren’t major changes from the previous release, with just the version being removed from Azure DevOps Server so that the information applies to all versions, including the recently released Azure DevOps Server 2020.
Find this guide here: https://bit.ly/2G40ep0.
Microsoft announce the public preview of the Private Azure Marketplace.
This tenant level feature is built on top of the Azure Marketplace and enables an administrator to add apps from the Azure Marketplace into the Private Azure Marketplace that comply with their organisation’s policies and standards thus making it easy for users to deploy these pre-approved apps within the organisation.
Note that Microsoft apps are automatically added to the Private Azure Marketplace.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3ooTofb, and instructions on setting up the Private Azure Marketplace here: https://bit.ly/2J4wUjb.
Microsoft announce that SharePoint Syntex is available from 1 October 2020. This is the first product from Project Cortex, an initiative designed to use AI to automatically organise content.
Users can train Syntex to read content the way they do, and advanced AI in the product captures and tags both structured and unstructured content, with the objective of meeting the product’s tagline – to transform content into knowledge.
Every user using the services of SharePoint Syntex needs to be licensed, which is via a $5 per user per month Add-on to Microsoft 365 F1/F3/E3/A3/E5/A5 or Office 365 F3/E1/A1/E3/A3/E5/A5.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3e0z3aV, the SharePoint Syntex page here: https://bit.ly/3jtgKws, and information on Project Cortex here: https://bit.ly/3jvPCwK.
There are lots of different ways to optimise costs in Azure, but this list is great to remind you of the basics (Reservations, Azure Hybrid Benefit etc) as well as newer options specific to running SQL in Azure, or using Azure Backup solutions.
Find the full list here: https://bit.ly/2J7pVWR.
Microsoft release Azure DevOps Server 2020 to the web. The October 2020 Product Terms is already updated for this product and there are no changes to the existing Server/CAL licensing model.
Find the announcement of availability here: https://bit.ly/2J2e1xr.
There’s an updated (October 2020) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide.
It’s updated for new offers (Project Operations), new entitlements (Commerce and Customer Insights), and new additional capacity (Business Central). It’s also gone through some reformatting with a new cover and applications moved into alphabetical order, and it also now includes the Business Central and Mixed Reality offers.
Find this updated guide here: https://bit.ly/34k1iNm
Microsoft Teams Rooms Standard and Premium Device SLs are added to the October 2020 Product Terms document.
Microsoft announced these products back in July 2020 when the Meeting Room licence was rebranded as the Microsoft Teams Rooms Standard offering, retaining its price of $15 per device per month, and the Microsoft Teams Rooms Premium offering was launched in certain countries for $50 per device per month.
This new offering contains all the licences included with Teams Rooms Standard (Teams, Skype for Business Online, Intune) and also incorporates a remote management service where Microsoft manage and monitor Microsoft Teams Rooms.
Find the original announcement here: https://bit.ly/39ACu6j and a useful product FAQ here: https://bit.ly/34jOaYA.