Author: Ben Tight

Understanding Microsoft’s Removal of Transitions: Implications for Online Services in Enterprise Agreements

Microsoft removed “transitions” from the February 2016 Product Terms document.   Upon the addition of Online Services in the Enterprise Agreement (EA) these transitions were used when a client wished to convert a traditional on premise license into an Online Services User Subscription License (USL).

Last year Microsoft removed “transitions” from the EA language last year and has now closed the final loophole.

If you have questions or concerns about the impact of this change, we encourage you to contact one of our unbiased licensing experts for a free initial consultation.

Understanding Changes to Microsoft Roaming Rights: Insights from February’s Product Terms Document

February’s Microsoft Product Terms Document brings significant changes to how Microsoft Roaming Rights will be handled for Windows Enterprise and VDA.

From the February Product Terms:

4.14 Roaming Rights Retirement for Windows Enterprise and Windows VDA

Customers with active SA for Windows Enterprise or Windows VDA retain Roaming Rights through the later of:

• the end of their existing Enrollment or Agreement term, or
• January 31, 2017

Current Licensing Requirements for Windows VDA Roaming Use Rights As per Microsoft licensing Brief:

Windows VDA Rights allow for a licensed device or user to access virtual Windows desktops either remotely and/or locally, depending on how the device or user is licensed. You can license devices or users for Windows VDA rights in the following ways:

– License devices with Windows Software Assurance or Windows VDA subscription on a per device basis.

– License users with Windows Software Assurance or Windows VDA subscription on a per user basis.

 Roaming Use Definition

The single primary user of the device licensed with active Windows Software Assurance or Windows VDA subscription (work device) can do the following:

At any one time, remotely access one or more of the permitted instances running on your servers (for example, in your data center) from a third-party device.

At any one time, run one instance of the software in a virtual OSE on a qualifying third-party device.

When the primary user is on your or your affiliates’ company premises, Roaming Use Rights are not applicable.

These Windows VDA Rights and the corresponding Roaming Use Rights are non-perpetual and are only active as long as the underlying Software Assurance for Windows, Windows VDA subscription, and/or Windows CSL is active.

Potential Licensing Impact: A Per-User VDA subscription will also be required for Roaming Use rights.

If you have questions or concerns about the impact of this change we encourage you to contact one of our unbiased licensing experts for a free initial consultation.

Change is one constant in the Microsoft licensing world.   Recently Microsoft has announced a rather significant change to their Enterprise Agreement (EA) program.  Effective July 1, 2016 the minimum commitment to the Enterprise Agreement (EA) program will increase from 250 qualified users/devices to 500 qualified users/devices.

 What does this mean for Clients?

Existing EA customers who do not meet the new minimum commitments can obviously continue within their current agreements until expiration.  At that point, it appears existing EA customers will have the option to extend their existing agreements by 36 months.  After the extension expires they will have to transition to either the Microsoft Products and Services Agreement (MPSA) or the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) agreements if they do not meet the minimum 500 users/device count.

 Why is Microsoft Making this Change and What Should I expect?

For many years the EA program was the core licensing vehicle that Microsoft drove any and all clients (who met the qualifications) towards.   Its clear now that Microsoft is incredibly focussed on their cloud offerings and the MPSA/CSP programs are better positioned to drive that agenda.   Expect Microsoft and their partners to begin aggressively attempting to move clients onto the MPSA/CSP programs rather than extending their EAs.

What steps should I take?

Contact MetrixData360 to have a free initial consultation to evaluate your Microsoft licensing options with one of our licensing experts.  We are not a Microsoft partner and offer unbiased licensing guidance to our clients.  Our focus is to reduce your Microsoft costs and help you negotiate the best possible Microsoft contract.

Want to save 37% off your Office 365 deployments and your annual subscription costs?  Read up below to see how we did just this for our tiny Office 365 E3 deployment here at MetrixData360.

Many of you may not know this, but we use Office 365 to run our business.  It wasn’t our first choice (in fact we used to run on Google), but we ended up migrating to it for one very simple reason:

• Outlook Calendars and Google just don’t work well. We would accept meetings on our iPhones and with the one-way sync between Google and calendaring (if you accept in Google it will populate to your phone but not the other way around) we were missing important meetings.

When we decided to move to Office 365 we purchased E3 subscriptions for our 12 users.  It was just the simplest thing for us to do.  As we were doing budgeting for 2016, we were looking at the costs of all of our subscriptions (Office 365, DropBox, WebEx, etc.) and realized the annual fees on all of these were getting out of hand so we decided to follow our own advice and optimized our licensing.

For various reasons we will continue to use Dropbox and WebEx (even though we have the ability to use OneDrive and Skype for Business).  Simplicity and functionality rules for us here at MetrixData360.

OneDrive does not work well with Mac (and a few of us use those).  The only way to get access is via the web client which is a very cumbersome way to access file storage technologies.  Even though they have a OneDrive for business client for Mac (Beta), after many hours of trying we never were able to get it to work correctly.  Microsoft really has a lot of work to do on this one.

Similarly, Skype for Business is not as good as WebEx for meetings.  We use the Instant Message features of Skype but not the online meetings (we were finding it was hard to manage, calls dropping, poor call quality when doing VOIP, etc).  One of our biggest reasons for continuing on WebEx however was for marketing.  WebEx is so much more feature rich for recording and doing webinars, which are very important to our business.

When we looked at our usage we found that half of our users really only needed Exchange Online Plan 1.  We swapped them out immediately and dropped our number of E3 subscriptions.  The net was a 37% reduction in our annual costs of Office 365.  I hesitate to think of the impact to the bottom line of our largest clients (100’’s of thousands if not millions of dollars are being wasted) that are overpaying Microsoft.

We have some exciting news that we will be sharing shortly.  We are working with our partners over at Block 64 on a new service offering that we will be launching in the first quarter of 2016 to help companies who use Office 365 get the same results we did.  We plan on automating the review and showing you how to optimize those Office 365 subscriptions across your organization to save your precious budget dollars!  Stay tuned!

MetrixData360 specializes in helping organizations who are facing a Microsoft audit with assistance through every stage of the audit process.  Our goal is to reduce any compliance gaps you may have and ensure that you are only paying for the software and services you really need.   Contact us today to book a free consultation to see if we can help you!

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