Tag Archives: SCA

Shared Computer Activation available for Microsoft 365 Business

Microsoft announce that Shared Computer Activation will be available for Office 365 Business when it’s acquired as part of a Microsoft 365 Business licence.

A Microsoft 365 Business User SL only allows the installation of Office 365 Business on up to 5 PCs, but with SCA enabled a user may access Office 365 Business running (for example) in an RDS environment and it doesn’t count against that 5 PC limit. The roll out of SCA for Microsoft 365 Business customers began on 30 April, 2019 and is expected to take a couple of months.

Find the announcement here: http://bit.ly/2EzL3Qn.

Shared Computer Activation for Service Provider’s shared servers

In September 2014, Microsoft introduced Shared Computer Activation (SCA) so that Office 365 ProPlus could be installed on a server and then used by users with shared hardware.

There were restrictions on the server which was used – if it wasn’t a customer-owned server then it had to be a Service Provider server dedicated to the customer’s use, or Windows Azure.

From January 2016 the rules have changed, and now shared Service Provider servers are eligible too – as long as the partner meets the requirements to be an “Authorized SCA Partner”.

You can see this change detailed on page 19 of the January 2016 Online Services Terms document, and a great resource for both customers and partners is the SCA site here: http://bit.ly/23675Q0