Microsoft announce that Access will now be included in Office 365 Business and Business Premium plans. The product will automatically be installed for licensed users between 1 December 2017 and 30 January 2017 if you’re on the Current Channel for updates, and in June 2017 if you’re on the Deferred Channel.
Find the Microsoft announcement here: http://bit.ly/2eenhhJ.
Microsoft announce that Microsoft PowerApps is generally available: http://bit.ly/2fuF4yT. PowerApps is all about creating apps (perhaps unsurprisingly!) and if you’re new to this product then I’d recommend watching the video on this “Introduction to PowerApps” page since it will give you a good insight into the sorts of things you can do: http://bit.ly/2fuL4rw.
PowerApps is licensed by user and Office 365 and Dynamics 365 licensed users have some basic PowerApps functionality included, and there are also more advanced standalone plans – PowerApps Plan 1 and Plan 2. Users licensed with the new Dynamics Enterprise Plan 1 or Plan 2 have PowerApps Plan 2 functionality included.
This page gives you a summary of what’s in what plan: http://bit.ly/2fKdhOl and if you want some examples of different apps and how they would be licensed, then this page is a good resource: http://bit.ly/2eNu1iG.
Microsoft announce that Microsoft Flow is generally available. What exactly is Flow? Well, it’s short for “workflow” and it’s there to help power users automate repetitive tasks.
There’s some guided learning available for Flow and this page (http://bit.ly/2f8DX9I) shows an example: you could automatically add popular Twitter followers talking about your company as leads in Dynamics 365 and then send a follow-up email via Mailchimp.
And the licensing? Well, there are standalone Flow plans (Flow Free, Plan 1 and Plan 2) and it’s also included in some Dynamics 365 and Office 365 plans too which gives us a fourth set of features – “Flow for Office 365 and Flow for Dynamics 365”.
This page is a good resource to find out what’s included in what plan: http://bit.ly/2fSuHHI and you can find the availability announcement here: http://bit.ly/2eewxSM.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 will be released on 1 November 2016 and there’s a useful page from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner Community team which gives you an introduction to the licensing and links to several useful resources including a Pricing and Licensing FAQ.
It’s definitely worth a read – find it here: http://bit.ly/2dM586y.
The Enterprise Mobility Suite is now Enterprise Mobility + Security and is available in E3 and E5 flavours. This is a useful page to find out the components of each suite and the business problems they solve: http://bit.ly/2e4hA2E.
Refer to page 53 of the October 2016 Product Terms document to see the User SLs available (Full, Add-on and From SA) and their availability in the different Volume Licensing programs.
The Azure Cost Estimator is now deprecated (http://bit.ly/AzureCostEstimator).
What are your alternatives to get estimated pricing for Azure? The public Azure Pricing Calculator (http://bit.ly/AzurePricingCalculator) is a good option or, if you’re a Microsoft partner, then you can request access to the Azure Channel Calculator (http://bit.ly/AzureChannelCalculator).
There’s a new (October 2016) Windows 10 Licensing Guide which you’ll find updated for Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and E5 as well as details for the Cloud Solution Provider program.
Find it in the desktop section of our Licensing Guides emporium: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
Operations Management Suite is aimed at those organisations which need to manage Windows and Linux workloads across a Windows Server datacenter, as well as Azure, Amazon Web Services, OpenStack and VMWare environments. It’s a collection of integrated Azure services for which the following licences have been available:
There are some October 2016 licensing changes which mean that the following licences are now available:
And these are the important things to note on these new licences:
You’ll find all of this documented officially in the October 2016 Product Terms on pages 52-53 and I think it’s worth noting one thing that remains unchanged: you may purchase an OMS Add-on SL through a different Volume Licensing agreement to the one through which you bought the qualifying System Center licences.
And finally, there’s an updated OMS Licensing Guide which has stretched to 9 pages of useful information and is worth a look through. Note that pricing used to be per virtual machine and it’s now per node. What’s a node? Well, page 6 of the Licensing Guide helps us out by stating that it’s a virtual machine, a physical server, a network device or other instance. As usual, find this Licensing Guide in the Core Infrastructure section here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
Microsoft announce the reduction in pricing of many of their most popular Azure virtual machines by between 10 and 50%. Find out which VM types are affected and get the details here: http://bit.ly/2dEUYEb.
Page 22 of the October 2016 Online Services Terms document confirms that the Intune device limit has been increased; licensed users may now access and use the Intune Online Service and System Center software to manage up to 15 devices.