Author Archives: Louise Ulrick

Office LTSC 2024

Office LTSC 2024 should be with us later in the year and it’s currently in commercial preview. Here are some useful facts: it will be 10% more expensive than Office LTSC 2021, it won’t ship with Publisher as that’s being retired, and Microsoft have committed to another LTSC release in the future.

Find the original announcement article here: https://bit.ly/3TjTyWj, and an update here: https://bit.ly/4fSLrtd. Office’s best friends, Project 2024 and Visio 2024, are also in preview and expected to be generally available later in the year too.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (August 2024) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide with a couple of changes. Firstly, the prerequisites for Copilot for Sales and Service are updated on pages 34/35, and secondly the included entitlements for Contact Center and Customer Service are amended throughout from per tenant to per user. Other minor changes include some additions to the Finance Capabilities table on page 21 and the removal of the term “seeded capacity” in favour of “included capacity”.

Find this updated guide here: https://bit.ly/3WPKPvP.

Exchange Server SE

Microsoft confirm (May 2024) that the next version of Exchange Server will be a Subscription Edition (SE) which will be available early in the third quarter of 2025. From a licensing perspective it will follow the same rules as for SharePoint Server SE: you’ll need active SA to use the product – or buy the subscription licences – and if the SA lapses, then you retain rights to the 2019 version of the product.

Find the announcement article with migration path recommendations here: https://bit.ly/3X4Kbfp.

Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents

There are updated (August 2024) Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents which now include the Microsoft Entra Suite and a couple of the new components such as Entra Internet Access and Entra Private Access.

Get the Enterprise version of this document here: https://bit.ly/3yxc2LE, and the SMB flavour here: https://bit.ly/4deVHu2.

Copilot for Sales/Service prerequisites expanded

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.

Windows 365 Cross Region Disaster Recovery Add-on

Microsoft announce a business continuity service for Windows 365 to protect against regional outages. When activated, the service creates temporary copies of users’ Cloud PCs in alternative geographical regions, preserving installed applications, user settings, and data. The Windows 365 Cross Region Disaster Recovery Add-On license costs $5 per user per month and is currently only available for Windows 365 Enterprise users.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3LJfyFB, and the Learn documentation here: https://bit.ly/46HK1hf.

Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents

There are updated (July 2024) Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents with some small changes such as the addition of the Microsoft Entra Suite.

These useful documents tell you which (of the many) different components are included in which Office 365/Microsoft 365 plan, and there’s a table for SMB customers (https://bit.ly/4crTOde), and one for Enterprise customers (https://bit.ly/4cKyLlQ), and still more for specialist US customers – one for GCC (https://bit.ly/4eQCYq4), one for GCC High (https://bit.ly/3VTxtho) and the final one for DoD (https://bit.ly/3UrMlD7).

And, if you’re a partner, there’s exciting news – we’ve found the Excel version of these files! Drop us an email on info@licensingschool.co.uk from your work email address and we’ll send it on.

Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft announce that Microsoft Sentinel is now generally available in the Microsoft Defender portal as part of the unified security operations platform.

The announcement article here: https://bit.ly/3WvzCli gives a good overview of what Microsoft Sentinel customers on the commercial cloud with at least one Microsoft Defender XDR workload deployed will now be able to do. Microsoft Sentinel itself analyses large amounts of data to accelerate threat detection and responses across an organisation, and is billed by the volume of data stored in a Log Analytics workspace and analysed in Microsoft Sentinel.

Find the pricing page here: https://bit.ly/3Y9DrO7.