The December 2016 Hosting and Cloud Service Provider Newsletter is out. There’s just one item of licensing interest: the SPLA agreement will be refreshed in February 2017 with two small amendments – there’s a new primary place of business field, and notices sent to Microsoft no longer need to be copied to the legal department.
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The Azure Hybrid Use Benefit datasheet is updated to cover both Windows Server 2012 R2 Processor-based licences and Windows Server 2016 Core licences, as well as for the availability of Windows Server images that can be chosen to deploy a VM with this benefit.
Find this datasheet in the Core Infrastructure section of our Licensing Guides emporium: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
Microsoft announce that from 1 February 2017 new customers will not be able to buy Azure consumption services through the MPSA, but confirm that existing customers are unaffected.
Advice to partners is that they should recommend the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) channel for any new pay-as-you-go Azure customers going forward.
Read the blog post here: http://bit.ly/2j0dACN.
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.
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.
The January 2017 Product Terms document alerts us to some product name changes:Â 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.