There’s a new (February 2025) Base and Additive CALs licensing guidance document from Microsoft which is an evolution of the October 2020 Microsoft Server Base and Additive CALS Overview Licensing Brief document. It’s broadly the same information covered, but all the diagrams showing the layered structure of Base and Additive CALs are removed to be replaced with more comprehensive explanations and links to the Product Terms.
Find this new document here: https://bit.ly/4b5Lzn3.
There’s a new (January 2025) Subscription License Suites document. It’s a slightly modified version of what you’d find in the Product Terms to document what components are in which suites, but more usefully organised.
Find this document here: https://bit.ly/3PZEryW.
Microsoft expand the list of prerequisites for Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, adding in Microsoft 365 F1/F3, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, and Office 365 F3/E1.
Find the prerequisites listed in the Product Terms here: https://bit.ly/2OFt7vB.
LicenseVerse (with full history) updated: Copilot for Sales – https://bit.ly/4daRW8D and Copilot for Service – https://bit.ly/4drjM0n.
Microsoft announce that from October 1, 2024 there will be a change to the definition of an external user which will now state that a contractor or agent typically doesn’t work onsite for the customer every working day, or for more than 30 hours on average per week.
The glossary in the Product Terms will be updated in October, but you can find the announcement and the affected products here in the meantime: https://bit.ly/3Lgi2v2.
Microsoft expand the list of prerequisites for Copilot for Microsoft 365 once more, adding in Microsoft 365 Apps for business/enterprise as well as a number of standalone licences like Exchange/SharePoint Online.
Find the prerequisites listed in the Product Terms here: https://bit.ly/3xvmnY0.
Microsoft add new failover rights for Azure SQL Database to the December 2023 Product Terms. Now, when a secondary database replica is used only for disaster recovery, and doesn’t have any workloads running on it or applications connecting to it, you can save on licensing costs by designating the database as a standby replica. Microsoft provide you with the number of vCores licensed in the primary database at no extra charge, but you’re still billed for the compute and storage that the secondary database uses.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4b6kRKK, the relevant part of the Product Terms here: https://bit.ly/3Y6xsac, and instructions for configuring the standby replica here: https://bit.ly/3HxEzlc.
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.
Microsoft have made a number of changes to Windows Server 2022 licensing, detailed in the April 2023 Product Terms.
First of all they’ve removed the requirement for a customer to have a minimum of 16 Windows Server Core licences in their estate before they can take advantage of licensing by virtual machine or use the Azure Hybrid Benefit. Secondly, there’s a change to the Azure Hybrid Benefit where Windows Server Core licences no longer have to be kept in groups of 8 when licensing a virtual machine with more than 8 cores – previously a 20-core virtual machine would have needed 24 licences (3×8), now it just needs 20.
Then there are changes to the rights when Windows Server licences are acquired as Software Subscriptions through CSP. If a customer has these licenses then they may use Standard licences with Windows Server Datacenter virtual machines. This right is available to them if they’re running their virtual machines in their own on-premises data centres, or with Authorized Outsourcers.
And finally there are changes when a CSP-Hoster partner sells Windows Server Software Subscription licences as part of a solution which they are hosting and managing for a customer. In this case, there’s no need for Windows Server CALs or External Connector licences, and the right to use Standard licences with Datacenter images also applies as above.
If you want to be the first to know when there’s a change made to the Product Terms, consider subscribing to the new Product Terms RSS feed. If you haven’t added an RSS feed to Outlook before, use the instructions here: https://bit.ly/3AiPz2k with this link: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/terms/feed/rss.
There’s a change to BizTalk Server 2020 licensing where the option to license at a virtual machine level becomes a Software Assurance benefit. Find the updated language in the Product Terms here: http://bit.ly/3AyCCSk.