Tag Archives: Visual Studio

Visual Studio Licensing Changes

There are some great changes announced to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online licensing starting on 1 September 2015.

As you may know, Visual Studio Online is essentially the online version of Team Foundation Server. VS Online is licensed with a User Subscription Model and TFS with a traditional Server/CAL model. The first big change to the licensing is that if you buy any Visual Studio Online subscription you get a TFS CAL for the named user of the subscription, which means that that user can access VS Online or TFS or both VS Online AND TFS.

Then there’s new pricing for the VS Online Basic subscriptions: the overall price has been reduced and volume discounts have been introduced. In practical terms, this means that 45 users using VS Online Basic today costs $800/month but with the new structure will only cost $310/month.

The details for these changes are in another of Microsoft’s Brian Harry’s great blog posts (http://bit.ly/1ItZxxl) where you’ll also find the timing of the changes for all types of customers

MSDN Administrators’ Guide – MPSA

Organisations buying Visual Studio with MSDN through the MPSA will use a brand new portal to manage their MSDN subscriptions.

There’s a just-released Administrator’s Guide which has 24 pages of useful knowledge including admin for large teams and external contractors, how to add administrators to the portal, as well as all the day-to-day tasks of assigning subscriptions along with instructions for the Bulk Upload facilities.

Get the guide here: http://bit.ly/1fYNT2V but note that existing subscriptions are still managed through VLSC, so the VLSC Admin Guide is worth a look too: http://bit.ly/1ucJ3hm.

VS and MSDN available under MPSA

Visual Studio and MSDN products are now available to order through the MPSA.

There’s a brand new portal to manage MSDN subscriptions purchased under the MPSA while existing subscriptions continue to be managed via VLSC.

Read the Microsoft blog post and see some screenshots of the new portal here: http://bit.ly/1O5UnaF.

January 2015 Visual Studio Licensing Whitepaper

There were changes to Visual Studio licensing effective from January 2015 and the Visual Studio 2013 and MSDN Licensing Whitepaper is updated to reflect this. And what were the changes?

Simply that target servers receiving automated deployment from Release Management Server no longer require a Visual Studio Deployment licence.

The only other change to the document is that the recently added requirement for a “Declaration of MSDN Licenses” is removed. Get the guide here: http://bit.ly/1JQmpGU.

Visual Studio 2015

Microsoft announce the new line-up for Visual Studio 2015. These are the headlines:

  • Premium and Ultimate editions are replaced with a single, new Enterprise edition
  • Existing Premium and Ultimate with MSDN customers will get a free upgrade to Enterprise
  • The price of Enterprise will be less than today’s Ultimate pricing
  • VL customers will be able to upgrade from Professional to Premium between 1 May and 30 June and then be eligible for Enterprise edition;
  • Release time is summer 2015.

The announcement is here – http://bit.ly/1I6SBXf – and pricing/upgrade information is here – http://bit.ly/1G6vSdl.

Changes to Visual Studio Online Licensing

There are further changes to Visual Studio Online licensing with additional rights being moved from the Visual Studio Online Advanced licence to the Basic one. These include user acceptance testing, all project management features, and the Team Rooms feature.

Read the full announcement here: http://bit.ly/1yZQYAE.

November 2014 Visual Studio and MSDN Licensing Whitepaper

There’s an updated (November 2014) Visual Studio and MSDN Licensing Whitepaper, so here’s a summary of those November changes and you can download the document here: http://bit.ly/1JQmpGU.

  • There’s a section added for Visual Studio Community 2013 which is the new collection of the Visual Studio Express SKUs. It’s free to download and any individual developer can use it to create their own free or paid apps. Businesses are also allowed to use it with various restrictions in place for commercial activities, but all organisations are able to use it for a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects. There are a couple of useful scenarios on page 10 to clarify the usage rights
  • There are some changes to the licensing of the Release Management solution. Previously, each node or endpoint to which an application was deployed needed to be licensed with either Visual Studio Deployment 2013 Standard or Datacenter. However, from 1 January 2015, target servers receiving automated deployments from Release Management Server will no longer require a Visual Studio Deployment licence as per page 32

The last time we reviewed this document was July 2014 and there were further releases (it transpires) in August and October 2014, so the following changes may also be interesting to you:

  • Visual Studio Online: there is clarification on page 6 showing how the different MSDN subscriptions correlate to the various Visual Studio Online plans, and confirmation that an unlimited number of stakeholders can join a Visual Studio Online account to carry out tasks such as entering and editing work items and submitting feedback. Details on purchasing Visual Studio Online via an Azure subscription are also confirmed on page 12
  • The MSDN Cloud Use Rights are updated throughout to allow the running of MSDN software on Azure VMs only rather than also on VMs run on shared servers owned by third parties – previously known as Qualified MSDN Cloud Partners. See page 16 for example
  • There are some enhancements to the rules around assigning MSDN subscriptions to external entities on page 22 and new text states that customers must track assignments for all external entities and could be asked to provide a “Declaration of MSDN Licenses” amendment that is signed both by the customer and its outsourced entity
  • There is also clarification throughout that MSDN Subscriptions obtained as benefits of the Microsoft Partner Program can’t be used for direct revenue-generating activity and that organisations must purchase subscriptions – see page 22 for example
  • And finally there is some relaxation of the rules for when a Team Foundation Server CAL is required: page 26 confirms that one is not required for entering, viewing or editing any work items (previously it was just ones you had created) and on page 32 the requirement for having a CAL for anyone triggering the release pipeline sequence is removed

Upcoming Changes to Visual Studio Licensing

There are a number of changes coming to Visual Studio licensing – most from 1 Jan 2015 – and this excellent Microsoft blog takes you through the detail in a delightfully readable way: http://bit.ly/13vrp29.

If that still hasn’t tempted you then here’s the overview: there’s a reduction in licences required for release management, test execution rights are added to Visual Studio Online Basic and the Team Foundation Server CAL, prices are reduced for cloud load testing and the VS Online build service, spending caps can be applied for load testing and build, and the ten user limit is removed for Visual Studio Online Professional. It’s all go in the Visual Studio world!

Upcoming Visual Studio Online Licensing Changes

There will be a new “Stakeholder” licence available for Visual Studio Online accounts from mid-August. This free licence will give access to a restricted feature set and there will be an unlimited number of Stakeholder users allowed.

Read the full Microsoft article here (http://bit.ly/1m7zj4a) and get the heads up on other changes to Visual Studio licensing that may come to pass.

Visual Studio Online Resources

Not sure about the new Visual Studio Online plans? This page is a good resource showing you the differences between the plans, the pricing, and some useful FAQs: http://bit.ly/1mIkEQU.