Microsoft Mesh is generally available

Microsoft announce that Microsoft Mesh is now generally available, allowing you to join a Teams meeting as an Avatar within a 3D space. Features are available to everyone licensed with a Microsoft 365 Business Basic/Standard/Premium, Microsoft 365 E3/E5 or Office 365 E1/E3/E5 licence, with the creation of customised 3D spaces requiring a Teams Premium licence. Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3u0k917.

Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents

There are updated (January 2024) Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents. These jolly useful documents tell you which (of the many) different components are included in which plan, and now there’s a table for SMB customers (https://bit.ly/3U6iUIh), one for Enterprise customers (https://bit.ly/3u0nn4H), one for Education customers (https://bit.ly/47TMmnS) and still more for EEA customers – one for SMB (https://bit.ly/3S8K0Mm) and the final one for Enterprise (https://bit.ly/428kLhw). Enjoy!

Office/Microsoft 365 EEA offerings

Late in August 2023, Microsoft announced that there would be changes to the offerings available in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to address European competition concerns – you can read that article here: https://bit.ly/3Pfx0Ty. These offerings are now live in the October 2023 Product Terms, so here’s the summary…

A customer in these regions who has not purchased Office 365 E1/E3/E5 or Microsoft 365 E3/E5 before 1 October, 2023 must now buy “EEA (no Teams)” SKUs – which, as the names suggest, don’t include Teams. If the customer does want Teams, then they need to purchase a separate Teams EEA User SL for their users. If they have purchased any of these licences before 1 October then they can add more licences and renew existing Subscriptions.

For Microsoft 365 Business Basic/Standard/Premium, customers in the affected regions will be able to choose the original offerings or new EEA flavours without Teams. The same goes for Microsoft 365 F1/F3 and Office 365 F3.

This site, aimed at partners, has information about pricing, and a useful FAQ document: https://bit.ly/3EDGHX4.

Copilot and friends: the summary

Here’s the licensing summary of the latest AI-ification that Microsoft is enabling in products.

First, Windows Copilot will be included in Windows 11 and available in preview this year – find out more about that here: https://bit.ly/45BkJzz.

Next, Bing Chat Enterprise is currently in preview and will be included in Microsoft 365 E3/E5 and Microsoft 365 Business Standard/Premium licences. On release it’ll also be available as a standalone offering for $5 per user per month, and will be accessible from Windows Copilot. Microsoft 365 Copilot is also in preview and will be a $30 per user per month Add-on for Microsoft 365 E3/E5 and Microsoft 365 Business Standard/Premium licensed users. Find out more about Bing Chat Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Copilot here: https://bit.ly/457xWQC.

And finally, Sales Copilot includes the Viva Sales capabilities and is generally available both as a standalone licence and included for users licensed for Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise/Premium. Find out more about that here: https://bit.ly/3DWd0jL.

Microsoft 365 plan comparison document

There’s an updated (August 2023) 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. This latest refresh is updated for the name change of Azure Active Directory to Entra ID, includes more detail on the Defender Vulnerability Management SKUs, and updates the Viva section with Viva Glint and Viva Goals.

Find this useful document here: https://bit.ly/3sdixQj.

Microsoft Clipchamp

Clipchamp is a tool to help users to create professional-looking videos, and Microsoft announce that it will be available to users with Microsoft 365 E3/E5 or Microsoft 365 Business Standard/Premium licences starting at the end of August 2023.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3YvSik1, and the product pages here https://bit.ly/443U3WL and here https://bit.ly/3Soihc5, confirming which plans will have access, and that Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers already have Clipchamp included.

Microsoft 365 Business plan comparison document

There’s an updated (March 2023) version of the Microsoft 365 Business plan comparison document showing you the different components available in the three Microsoft 365 Business plans, as well as a comparison with Teams Essentials. Find this document here: https://bit.ly/3AfyRR8.

Microsoft 365 plan comparison document

There’s a February 2023 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.

Microsoft Cost Management summary for 2022

The Microsoft Cost Management tools help you to manage your Microsoft cloud costs across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure. There’s an excellent article giving an overview of the improvements that were made to the tools in 2022, as well as the new ways to save money that were introduced.

You can find the article here: http://bit.ly/3Wltkkw, with its many links to lots of useful resources.