Tag Archives: Microsoft

Extended Service Term in CSP

Microsoft announce that from April 1, 2026, a new option called the Extended Service Term (EST) will be available when CSP subscriptions expire. Customers currently have the choice to renew automatically, and if they don’t, the subscription goes into a grace period, meaning no loss of service. From April 1, 2026, the grace period will no longer exist. Instead, the options will be to either renew automatically, cancel at expiry, or leave auto-renew off and move to EST. When the subscription is in the EST a new SKU is used, and service continues – billed at an uplifted rate. EST allows customers to maintain access to their services while they decide their next steps, at which point they have flexibility to take another route.

An overview of the details and a useful timeline can be found here: https://bit.ly/47KgLIz.

Document Processing for Microsoft 365 – the new name for Syntex

Microsoft’s AI-powered content management services have been renamed from Microsoft Syntex to Document Processing for Microsoft 365. Supplementing SharePoint, the features and functionality remain the same as before, with the billing still tied to a pay-as-you-go Subscription in Azure. Interestingly, if you have this billing mechanism set up, there’s a limited amount of included capacity allowing you to try the services for free, until December 2025.

Discover the details of Document Processing here: https://bit.ly/4o1NHSy, with pricing information on this link: https://bit.ly/4qERUxx.

Modern Work Plan Comparison documents

The Modern Work Plan Comparison documents are available for October 2025, with separate PDFs for the Enterprise, SMB, US Government, and Education sectors. Be cautious with the Education page, however! It shows that the new Microsoft Purview Suite and Microsoft Defender Suite can be added onto Office 365 A1, even though the Product Terms state you need A3 or higher as a qualifying plan. We’ve started documenting these kinds of errors in the “Licensing Guide cautionary notes” section of LicenseVerse, so do keep an eye on that page for these useful insights. In the meantime, you’ll find the documents here: https://bit.ly/4hn2hS2. If you’re a partner, we have an Excel version of these files.

Drop us an email on info@licensingschool.co.uk from your work email address and we’ll send it on.

Viva Pulse is now available to all Viva Glint customers

Viva is Microsoft’s Employee Experience Platform (EXP) and features two complementary offerings which no longer require separate purchases. Viva Pulse helps managers and team leaders gauge and react to team sentiment via anonymous surveys, while Viva Glint differs by focusing on understanding company-wide feedback and then assisting with implementing strategic change. These offerings were traditionally sold as individual User SLs or as part of the Viva Suite, but now, a Viva Glint licence automatically includes Viva Pulse. This close integration means management teams can directly follow up a Viva Glint engagement survey with their specific team, enabling more focused and tailored Pulse feedback, as well as other integration features.

You can read the details here: https://bit.ly/4njvZsE.

Auto-Archiving for Exchange Online

There’s a new feature in Exchange Online that automatically archives the oldest items in your mailbox after it reaches 96% of its quota. This goes hand in hand with the current time-based archiving and avoids any email disruption that could be caused by hitting mailbox limits due to big attachments or large volumes of AI-generated content. Exchange Online Plan 1 and Plan 2 will continue to offer a 50 GB and 100 GB archive mailbox respectively. This feature is currently in private preview for selected customers, will be in public preview from 15 November, 2025, and generally available in January 2026.

There are some useful FAQs and details of the announcement here: https://bit.ly/43nKeFC.

Microsoft 365 – Unattended License Overview Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (May 2025) Microsoft 365 – Unattended License Overview Licensing Guidance. If you haven’t come across this document before, it’s got some useful information on how you license a bot to run repetitive tasks in a Windows client or Microsoft 365 App without user intervention. The updates are slightly odd – references to Windows 11 are removed in favour of Windows 10, and it’s not yet updated for the “new” Power Automate licences introduced in August 2023. We’ve got a new section in LicenseVerse – Licensing Guides Cautionary Notes – to keep you informed of errors like this in current Microsoft Licensing Guides.

Help yourself to this May 2025 document here: https://bit.ly/4nDXHBb.

Copilot License Details Diagnostic

If you’re rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot you might find the Copilot License Details Diagnostic useful. Released in August 2025 it validates whether users are properly licensed to access Microsoft 365 Copilot by performing a series of checks.

Find out more in this article: https://bit.ly/3JVPHwA.

Azure SRE Agent and AAUs

The Azure SRE Agent is designed to streamline incident response, improve service uptime, and cut operational costs, allowing Site Reliability Engineers to focus on higher-value tasks. Why’s it interesting from a licensing perspective? It’s the first Azure-hosted autonomous Agent that’s billed via a new measure – Azure Agent Units or AAUs. The Azure SRE Agent continuously monitors in the background incurring charges of 4 AAUs an hour and then, when issues are detected, billing is 0.25 of an AAU for every second the Agent is engaged on a task.

Find a good article with some example billing scenarios here: https://bit.ly/47utIGS.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and the Microsoft 365 Apps

The various Copilot offerings have somewhat evolved over time! We have seen Microsoft Copilot become Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, and there are new features being added all the time. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is a collection of AI features, the newest of which is chat functionality within the Microsoft 365 Apps. This means that if you have a valid Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licence, you’ll now find a snazzy sidebar in your apps which is aware of the context of the document you have open, and will provide natural language assistance based on what it sees. No need for a separate Microsoft 365 Copilot licence!

There is more information on the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3DZCgca, along with eligibility criteria here: http://bit.ly/4oycQEb.

Windows 365 20% promotion extended

Microsoft prolong their Windows 365 promotion, which offers a 20% discount to first-time customers. This ties in neatly with the flexibility offered to users of a Windows 10 device (now end of support), as they can continue to receive ESUs whilst accessing Windows 365. The promotion runs until April 30, 2026.

Read more here: https://bit.ly/4hjL2Bc.