Licensing hosted RPA scenarios

Power Automate now supports two hosted RPA scenarios to enable organisations to set up and scale automation. As a reminder, RPA desktop flows can be run either with human interaction (known as “attended”) or without (“unattended”). The new options offer a hosted machine for attended or unattended RPA aimed at users who want to build, test or run automation. Alternatively, there’s a hosted machine group option for unattended RPA which offers automatic scaling and dynamic load balancing. From a licensing perspective, you need to acquire a Hosted RPA Add-on licence for as many bots as you want to run concurrently, and this licence has a prerequisite of either the Power Automate Per User with Attended RPA licence or a Per Flow licence, and costs $215 per bot per month.

You can find the announcement here: http://bit.ly/3JbWoZ4, pricing here: http://bit.ly/3ooVJb2, and the Learn documentation here: http://bit.ly/3DfJN3f.

Microsoft 365 plan comparison document

There’s an October 2022 version of the popular Microsoft 365 plan comparison document showing you the different components in all of the Enterprise and Frontline Worker plans and the Add-on licences that are available. Find this useful document here: https://bit.ly/2LG4gqi.

General Availability of Teams Phone Mobile

Microsoft announce the General Availability of Teams Phone Mobile, previously known as Operator Connect Mobile, which gives users a single, business-provided number for Teams and their mobile phone.

From a licensing perspective users will need to be licensed for Teams Phone and will also need to have the $0 Teams Phone Mobile Add-on licence assigned to them.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3yO1aGi.

Microsoft Teams Premium

Microsoft announce Teams Premium, which will be in Public Preview in December and generally available in February 2023. It will be licensed via an add-on to Teams with an expected price of $10 per user per month.

In terms of functionality, expect AI features such as intelligent recaps to summarise meetings with actions, and live translation for captions, as well as options for keeping confidential meetings confidential, help in streamlining registration workflows, and the availability of rich analytics.

The announcement article, which you can find here: https://bit.ly/3yJGhfi, has a lot of additional information on the feature set, and this second article is useful for comparing the features existing Office 365/Microsoft 365 customers will have access to, compared to the additional Teams Premium licence: https://bit.ly/3VzqYzm.

Microsoft Defender for Business servers preview

Microsoft announce that Defender for Business servers is now in preview, offering endpoint security for Windows and Linux servers for small and medium-sized businesses. It’s free during this preview period and will then be charged at $3 per server instance per month at General Availability, when it will be available as an Add-on licence to Microsoft 365 Business Premium or Microsoft Defender for Business.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3RZ7TVO, and a useful FAQ here: https://bit.ly/3BhF3d3.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Microsoft announce that Microsoft Cloud for Retail is generally available. This is an add-on licence with a variety of qualifying licences required, which enable different capabilities to give retailers a holistic view of their consumers with AI helping them to better understand and elevate the consumer shopping experience. It’s a tenant-wide licence available through the EA at $20,000 per month, deployable from the UK, US, Australia, Canada or Singapore.

There’s a useful datasheet here: https://bit.ly/3HXOK0K and you can find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/36cmWYx.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

Microsoft announce that Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services is generally available.

This is an add-on licence with a variety of qualifying licences required, which enable different capabilities to help retail banks to enhance customer and employee experiences, and to drive loyalty and customer growth.

It’s a tenant-wide licence available through the EA at $20,000 per month, deployable from the UK or the US. There’s a useful datasheet here: https://bit.ly/3xs6mha and you can find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3Cx1RCU.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (November 2021) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide with three main changes.

Firstly, the initial capacity for a Customer Insights licence now includes 10,000 B2B Accounts, and there’s a new Add-on available for an additional 10,000 B2B Accounts.

Secondly, there’s a new app for the Customer Service module called Voice Channel which is licensed via a User SL for users already licensed with a Customer Service Enterprise licence – see our blog for more details: https://bit.ly/3HUKAra.

And finally, Basic and Standard Edge Scale Unit Add-in and Overage licences are available for  Supply Chain Management; this is a good place to learn about SCM Scale Units: https://bit.ly/3r4TrjI.

Find this latest Licensing Guide here: https://bit.ly/3D0adnq.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Microsoft announce that Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit is generally available.

This is an add-on licence with a variety of qualifying licences required, dependent on which nonprofit scenarios are important to you in areas such as fundraising, and volunteer engagement and management.

It’s a tenant-wide licence available through the EA, CSP and Web Direct, and there’s a Basic plan which is free, and a Standard Plan 1 (for less than 250 employees) at $750 per month and a Plan 2 for more than 250 employees at $2,000.

The different qualifying licences and the scenarios they light up are detailed in a pricing datasheet which you can find here: https://bit.ly/30JcMMW, and the availability announcement with some useful links, including one to a webinar on 7 December, 2021 is here: https://bit.ly/30DRWOP.

Power Platform Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (April 2021) Power Platform Licensing Guide. There’s extra clarification added throughout around API management including confirmation on page 23 that the number of daily API requests in a Power Virtual Agents capacity add-on is limited to 15,000 per tenant.

Find this updated Licensing Guide here: https://bit.ly/2Q2dSNO.