Licensing School

Microsoft announce that Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus is currently in preview and will be available in Spring 2025. Like the existing Windows 365 Cross Region Disaster Recovery capability it will be an Add-on licence for Windows 365 Enterprise. So, what's the difference between these two options? Well, it's all about how quickly your systems are back up and running and the maximum amount of data loss that's acceptable. Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus improves on these metrics and you can find a useful table comparing the two licences on the announcement page here: https://bit.ly/4ie1pix.

There's an updated (March 2025) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide with just a few minor changes. You can find these documented in the Change Log on page 60 with perhaps the most significant being the removal of Fraud Protection. Find out more about that on our blog here: https://bit.ly/4hrYRMn, and download the updated guide here: https://bit.ly/4hlwoYG.

How's your knowledge of Azure Reservations? Give our latest exam a try and find out! Free to take with a certificate to download if you achieve the pass mark of 70%, it's all part of our Licensing Scholar program. This is where you take exams that are of particular interest to you and, when you've earned 100 credits, you get a Credly badge to alert others to your expertise. See our page with all sorts of exams here: https://bit.ly/4e3i1qs.

Microsoft announce that as of 3 February, 2025, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is no longer available for purchase, and that support will end on 3 February, 2026. Existing customers are directed to the announcement article for next steps to take: https://bit.ly/3FpevdX.

There's an updated (February 2025) Core CAL And Enterprise CAL Suites licensing guidance document from Microsoft. There aren't many changes from the previous (November 2020) version because, to be honest, not much has changed in the CAL Suites world. However, note that a couple of errors have been introduced into the table on page 3. Find this document here: https://bit.ly/3FgONIK.

Microsoft announce that Microsoft 365 Business Premium is now an eligible prerequisite for Microsoft 365 E5 Security. Microsoft 365 Business Premium already includes core security solutions for SMBs and the announcement article does a good job of explaining exactly where the security coverage is enhanced with this Add-on licence. Find the relevant article here: https://bit.ly/4ivoFrS.

There's a new (February 2025) Microsoft Sustainability Manager licensing guidance document from Microsoft. This is one of the Microsoft Cloud industry solutions and it's licensed with an Essentials or Premium tenant license costing $4,000 or $12,000 per month respectively, and $0 Essentials or Premium User SLs. The licensing guidance document has information on included Dataverse capacity, dependencies on other products, as well as an FAQ section, and you can find it here: https://bit.ly/3ECiNP3.

LicenseVerse is an online portal to a world of Microsoft licensing information. You can use it as a reference tool to look things up, with links to Microsoft's Product Terms, Learn documentation, and Licensing Guides. Or you can use it as a training tool to learn new areas of licensing, with lots of associated exams to check your knowledge as you go. It's a new and unique way of accessing licensing information, designed to save you hours, getting you to accurate up-to-date licensing information, fast. Join Louise on a free session and see how it could make a difference in your licensing life. Register here for the event on Tuesday 4th March at 2pm UK time: https://bit.ly/3EJWoiQ.

There's an updated (February 2025) Power Platform Licensing Guide with useful new tables on page 19. These give extra information on how messages are billed in Coplot Studio and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, in particular the new Tenant Graph grounding for messages. Find this updated guide here: https://bit.ly/42IxZUQ.

There's an updated (January 2025) CAL Suite Bridges licensing guidance document from Microsoft. Bridge CALs were first introduced in 2011 to help Enterprise Agreement customers maintain their enterprise-wide commitment to the Core and Enterprise CAL Suites as they moved to the cloud. This document has an overview, some scenarios, as well as tables taken from the Product Terms for CAL/CML equivalencies and prerequisites. Find this document here: https://bit.ly/3Ql8std.