Microsoft announce that Extended Security Updates will be available for Windows 7, for which extended support ends on 14 January, 2020. The Windows 7 ESU will be sold on a per-device basis and will be available to customers who have purchased Windows 7 Professional/Enterprise through a Volume Licensing program. The price of the Windows 7 ESU will increase each year, but there will be discounts available for customers with active SA or Windows 10 Enterprise/Education subscriptions. Find the announcement towards the end of this page: http://bit.ly/2N3kqty.
Switching an Azure CSP Subscription to another Partner
If a customer has bought Azure services through a CSP partner then there’s an Azure Subscription set up and charging for the consumed services is done via the partner. However, can an Azure Subscription be switched from one partner to another if need be? It can indeed – it’s not a particularly elegant process involving a form and action required from both partners and the customer, but if you need to do it you can find instructions here: http://bit.ly/2PxC19J.
Office 365 Data Loss Prevention User SL
An Office 365 Data Loss Prevention User SL is added to the September 2018 Product Terms and Online Services Terms documents. The table on page 34 of the OST is updated to show that Office 365 DLP is included in Office 365 E3/E5, and there’s a new table on page 94 of the Product Terms showing that this new licence is an Add-on for users of Microsoft 365 F1 or Office 365 Business Essentials, for example. As far as availability goes, page 65 shows that it’s just available through the EA or CSP. Find both of these monthly-updated documents here: http://bit.ly/MSPTOST.
Office 365 Home and Personal Subscriptions
Microsoft announce changes to the rights for Office 365 Home and Personal subscriptions. From 2nd October 2018, subscribers to either plan can install Office on an unlimited number of devices and be signed into their accounts on up to five of those devices at the same time. Previous rights were 10 devices for Home, and one PC/Mac and one tablet for Personal subscribers. There’s also an increase of the number of users associated with a Home subscription from five to six. Find the Microsoft announcement here: http://bit.ly/2wzWX8d.
How Azure Reservations work with Azure SQL Database
Azure Reservations for the Azure SQL Database service became available earlier in August 2018 (see our blog post here: http://bit.ly/2KROzpp). If you want to understand more about how the reservation discount is applied automatically to running Azure SQL Databases then this is a useful article: http://bit.ly/2vX61UR.
Visio Visual for Power BI available
Microsoft announce (July 2018) that Visio Visual for Power BI is generally available. This allows a user to use Visio Online and Power BI together to illustrate and compare data as both diagrams and visualisations in one place. From a licensing perspective, Office 365 subscribers can use five free trial instances of Visio Visual and after that, any user can view visuals, and users licensed with Visio Online Plan 1 or Plan 2 can edit a Visio Visual in Power BI.
Find the announcement here: http://bit.ly/2P9zTom.
Azure Marketplace Invoicing
Third-party services purchased through the Azure Marketplace are typically invoiced separately in an Enterprise Agreement, outside of Monetary Commitment. From 1 March, 2018 there were some Linux Support options and Linux virtual machines that were changed to consume Monetary Commitment.
Find the announcement and list of relevant services here: http://bit.ly/2Nn74Ed.
Government Licensing Guides
We’ve added a new section to our Licensing Guides emporium for documents to do with the Government licensing programs.
Find them in the Volume Licensing Programs section at: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
Managing Azure Reservations
You can buy an Azure Reservation to save money on the infrastructure charges (compute) for virtual machines or Azure SQL Databases. After purchase you can make adjustments to that reservation: change the Subscription it applies to, split a single reservation into two reservations, add or change users who can manage a reservation, and optimise for VM size flexibility or capacity priority.
Find a useful article with instructions here: http://bit.ly/2PnMOUC.
The Ultimate Guide to Windows Server on Azure
This not-too-long guide from Microsoft might be useful if you’re starting to think about taking Windows Server workloads to Azure. It outlines possible benefits, how to decide whether to migrate or extend a server farm, and of course the cost savings associated with the Azure Hybrid Benefit. Find it here: http://bit.ly/2KZtwCp.