Customers buying their Azure services through an Enterprise Agreement or via the MCA-E have long been eligible for free Azure Standard Support, but Microsoft announce that this offer is coming to an end on 30 June, 2024. After that time, customers will need to purchase one of the paid-for support plans.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4cASdBh (search for “Azure support”), and details of the available support plans here: https://bit.ly/44i3x1h.
Microsoft announce that Windows Server 2025 and System Center 2025 will be generally available later in 2024. Find the main announcement here: https://bit.ly/4cciUwB, and more information on System Center 2025 here: https://bit.ly/3KWV5wM.
There’s an updated (June 2024) Power Platform Licensing Guide. There are some changes to a couple of items on the AI Builder rate card, and now Power Pages Capacity Licenses accrue Dataverse Log capacity: 1 GB for each Capacity License for authenticated users, and 250 MB for anonymous users. The table on page 23 is a useful summary of the Power Pages entitlements.
Find this updated guide here: https://bit.ly/3Vqxhr5.
There’s an updated (May 2024) Viva feature comparison table which has Microsoft Copilot in Viva Engage added. Find this updated table here: https://bit.ly/3V4QU6J.
There’s an updated (June 2024) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide, with a lot of small tidying-up type changes which are pretty well documented in the Change Log on page 63.
The biggest change is the definition of an external user on page 43 which now states that a contractor or agent typically won’t work onsite for the customer every working day, or for more than 30 hours on average per week.
Find the updated guide here: https://bit.ly/3R8lriY.
Microsoft announce that they will retire Copilot GPT Builder starting 10th July, 2024. This means that users licensed with a Copilot Pro licence will no longer be able to create their own custom Copilot GPTs. All Copilot GPTs created by Microsoft or by customers will also be removed at this time. Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4bXhrdg.
There’s an updated (May 2024) Power Platform Licensing Guide. The main change is the replacement of the Power Automate Hosted RPA Add-on licence with the full (no prerequisites) Power Automate Hosted Process licence. This license is a superset of the Power Automate Process licence but with the addition of a Microsoft hosted virtual machine and an unattended RPA bot.
Find the updated guide here: https://bit.ly/4botvns.
Microsoft announced in October 2022 that Azure compute Reservations purchased on or after 1 January, 2024 would no longer be able to be exchanged. Then, in October 2023, they announced that there would be a grace period giving customers until at least 1 July, 2024 to exchange their Reservations for Azure Dedicated Host, Azure App Services, and Reserved Instances. The latest announcement in May 2024 states that the grace period is now extended until further notice.
Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4bPH4gl, and a useful article with some example scenarios here: https://bit.ly/3MdGC0m.
There’s an updated (May 2024) Microsoft 365 plan comparison document for education. You’ll find a new Cloud Access Security Broker section on page 6 gathering together products like Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Office 365 Cloud App Security, and Windows Autopilot moves into the Windows section on the same page.
Get this updated document here: https://bit.ly/4bpdmP2.
There’s an updated (April 2024) Viva feature comparison table, a very useful document that covers the Viva family of products and the various components. There are a few changes made to align it with some recent Microsoft announcements.
Firstly, a new column has been added for Viva Pulse – now available as a standalone licence costing $2 per user per month (https://bit.ly/3QHtAe0).
Additionally, the reference to Topics in Viva has been removed, as Viva Topics will be retired in February 2025 (https://bit.ly/3UGfACb).
And, notably, the document now specifies which Viva product requires a Microsoft Teams license, considering that Teams is now sold separately from the Office 365/Microsoft 365 suites (https://bit.ly/3vC9SZR).
Get this updated comparison table here: https://bit.ly/3UYgBHh.