Tag Archives: Office 365

Office available for Android phone

Microsoft announce the general availability of the new Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for Android phone – http://bit.ly/1JkxvWJ.

As usual, everyone gets access to the core features, while the premium features require a qualifying Office 365 subscription.

This page is useful for finding out exactly what the qualifying Office 365 plans are: http://bit.ly/1IAfQEP.

Overview of the Changes to the June 2015 Volume Licensing Product List

If you look at page 10 of the June 2015 Product List you’ll find that there are no changes listed for this month. So, we had to dig a bit deeper to find the (admittedly extraordinarily minor!) changes:

  • First of all, the Planning Services which used to include Lync Server and now include Skype for Business Server are indeed updated to be “Skype for Business and Exchange Deployment Planning Services (S&EDPS)” on page 68
  • Then there are some changes to the Microsoft Azure Services section on pages 41/42 with a slight amendment to the definition of “Consumption Rates” and the inclusion of MPSA as a qualifying agreement to set pricing for the Server pool and thus the Azure services in an EA
  • And finally, there’s wording added on page 58 for the purchase eligibility of the Office 365 From SA User SLs. This clarifies that EA customers who licensed Office 365 before 1 August 2014 may indeed also purchase From SA USLs at renewal for any additional Office 365 users that they added during their Enrolment term

MSDN Benefits

This is a nice article on 10 of the MSDN benefits including rights to deploy to Azure, perpetual use rights, Azure credit, Visual Studio Online, and Store and Office 365 Developer Accounts. Find it here: http://bit.ly/1LQ1Av2.

US Government Community Cloud

Government SKUs are available for the Enterprise Cloud Suite and Project/Visio for Office 365 in the May 2015 Product List. ECS is also available within the US Government Community Cloud program and the Product List is updated to show more clearly which services are available under this program – look out for a “UC” cell identifier.

If you want to know more about the GCC program and Office 365 features that are specific to this program, then this is a good resource: http://bit.ly/1JB3RsF.

Citrix Implementation Guide for Office 365

A useful Implementation Guide from Citrix for Office 365 with XenApp and XenDesktop detailing some best practices as well as a licensing section covering Shared Computer Activation.

Get the guide here: http://bit.ly/1a2dULE.

Office 365 Education – free to eligible students and teachers

Office 365 Education is now available free to students and teachers at schools that have licensed Office institution-wide for their faculty and staff.

The plan allows the installation of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access on up to 5 PCs or Macs, and the Office apps on other mobile devices.

It also includes 1TB of OneDrive storage and rights to Office Online.

See the Microsoft announcement confirming availability from 23 Feb 2015 here: http://bit.ly/1wQvxmg, and details on eligibility here: http://bit.ly/1M4JLJ5.

Changes to Power BI for Office 365 Rights

Dual access rights for Power BI for Office 365 USLs are removed: previously these licensed access to SQL 2014 Standard and Business Intelligence servers, but no longer – see page 6 of the January 2015 PUR.

Changes to services in the Office 365 Enterprise Plans

The services included in the Office 365 Enterprise Plans are always being refined and here are two to know about: from January 2015 new customers won’t have access to a SharePoint Online Public Website, although existing customers will continue to have access for another two years (http://bit.ly/1wvnKJX) and all Office 365 customers will have access to Office 365 Video by early 2015. What is Office 365 Video?

Essentially a new SharePoint portal type optimised for video so that organisations can post, share and discover video content. It’s powered by Azure Media Services and if you want to know more, it would be worth checking out the announcement here: http://bit.ly/1FschEy

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Simplification comes to Office 365 Activation

As of 17 November 2014, it’s easier to activate Office 365 subscriptions purchased via Open and Open Value programs.

Firstly, there’s a new streamlined activation method which means that you don’t even have to go into VLSC and the product keys are populated automatically for you – download a user guide for this process here: http://bit.ly/1yOOUQr.

Alternatively, if you prefer to initiate processes like this from VLSC then that’s still possible and you get the benefit of the simplified no-copying-and-pasting-of-product-keys improvements too.

Here’s the user guide explaining this process: http://bit.ly/1wciZbu.

See the Microsoft announcement here: http://bit.ly/1yOLoWd.