Tag Archives: General Availability

General Availability of Viva Sales

Microsoft announce that Viva Sales is generally available as of 3 October, 2022. Viva as a brand is about improving the employee experience, with the Viva Suite aimed at employees in any role across a business.

Viva Sales, however, is tailored to improve the employee experience for a specific role – sellers – and it enables these users to use Office 365 and Teams to automatically capture, access and register data into a CRM system, eliminating the administrative burden of manual data entry.

Viva Sales is included in Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licences, and is also available as a standalone licence priced at $40 per user per month.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3fZC28I, with links to other useful resources such as pricing information and an “Introduction to Viva Sales” course on Microsoft Learn.

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.

General Availability of Power Pages

Microsoft announce the General Availability of Power Pages at the Ignite conference on 12 October, 2022. Power Pages is the fifth product in the Power Platform family and, in common with the other members of the Power Platform family, is a low-code solution which enables any user to create a secure website, but with advanced capabilities for customisation by professional developers as required.

From a licensing perspective, you license a website for authenticated users and/or anonymous users, either on a subscription basis or on a pay-as-you-go basis. There is tiered pricing available for the subscription licences which starts at $200 for 100 authenticated users per site per month and $75 for 500 anonymous users per site per month, and which will be available to purchase from 1 November, 2022. The PAYG meters accrue charges against an Azure Subscription and cost $4 per authenticated user per site per month and $0.30 per anonymous user per site per month.

You can find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3TjBMja, pricing information here: https://bit.ly/3MBzV7a, and a whole host of useful licensing information here: https://bit.ly/3eyEcvH.

General Availability of Viva Goals

Microsoft announce that Viva Goals is now generally available. This Viva module is based on the acquired Ally.io product, and enables business goal setting and management via the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) goal-setting framework. From a licensing perspective, there’s a standalone Viva Goals license available for $6 per user per month, or it’s included in the existing Viva Suite license, currently costing $9 per user per month. Viva Goals is available as a Teams app where users must be licensed for Microsoft Teams, or a web app where there are no prerequisites.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3pbIMle, where there’s a good overview video, and the product/pricing page here: https://bit.ly/3bKcXwK.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Microsoft announce the June 1 General Availability of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.

It’s a solution that works across multiple industries to help an organisation to accelerate their sustainability progress towards net-zero emissions.

The new Microsoft Sustainability Manager helps customers to create a single and actionable view of their sustainability data, and is available through an EA or CSP costing $4,000 per tenant per month.

You can find a pricing datasheet on Microsoft Sustainability Manager here: https://bit.ly/3u4V1TG, and the GA announcement here: https://bit.ly/3OozVrt.

General Availability of Capacity Reservations

Microsoft announce the General Availability of Capacity Reservations for virtual machines.

A Capacity Reservation is linked to a specific virtual machine type running in a specific Azure data centre and ensures that there is always capacity available when you want to run a virtual machine of that type in that data centre.

They are priced the same as the Pay-As-You-Go prices for the VM, and if you have a matching Reserved Instance, that will automatically be applied to cover the charges of the Capacity Reservation.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3kiL53J, and a video explaining this new option here: https://bit.ly/3LFqVNr.

Power Platform Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (March 2022) Power Platform Licensing Guide, amended for the General Availability of the Pay-As-You-Go option for Power Apps.

You can find out more about this licensing option on our blog here: https://bit.ly/3Dme1R1, and download the updated guide here: https://bit.ly/3tni4rJ.

General Availability of PAYG option for Power Apps

Microsoft announce the General Availability of the Pay-As-You-Go option for Power Apps. Historically, Power Apps has been licensed Per User (allows a user to access any number of apps) or Per App (allows a user to access a particular app), and both of these options are paid in advance. If PAYG is enabled for an environment, then app usage is charged on a consumption basis against an Azure Subscription, with a cost of $10 per app per user per month.

So, if one month 5 users use 2 apps each, then the organization is charged 5 x 2 x $10 = $100, but if the next month, only 1 user uses the 2 apps, then the charges are only 2 x $10 = $20.

There’s a good explanation of how this new licensing option works in the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/36TfWjK, and there’s an on-demand video that’s worth a watch here: https://bit.ly/3tLrRsX.