Office 365 Licensing

Office 365 Licensing Scenarios Part 1

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This is a new series on csplicensing.com called “Office 365 Scenarios.”  The goal is to provide the reader with a licensing scenario for a typical Microsoft enterprise customer.  Enjoy!

 Scenario 1

 M & A Corporation is a large private equity firm with 500 employees worldwide.  They currently have the Enterprise CAL suite under an Enterprise Agreement.  They have one datacenter for mostly Exchange and SharePoint.

Current Needs

  1. Free up IT resources to focus on other projects besides managing a datacenter
  2. Identify a cloud partner to outsource their server environment.
  3. Senior executives need to have both On Premise and cloud solution for the same device.
  4. Find a collaboration tool to enhance communication between departments.
  5. Identify a solution for compliance and legal hold and email retention.
  6. Needed the solution yesterday and do not have time to wait for their agreement to expire.

Solutions

  • Issue 1&2 – Free up IT resources/Cloud Partner – The best way for M&A to free up IT resources without jeopardizing performance is to outsource their server environment to a third party.  Office 365 plan E3 provides SharePoint, Exchange, Office Pro Plus, and Skype for Business.
  • Issue 3 – On-Premise and cloud deployment for the same user- Office 365 has dual access rights.  This means that if an end user who has a USL (user subscription license) has the equivalent of an on premise CAL.  It does not include the server license.  If M&A wants to continue to run on premise workloads using the dual access right, they must own the server license.  Secondly, if they want decide not to use Microsoft datacenters for Office 365, they can use their Office 365 User SLs (as covered above) to access their servers deployed on third party shared servers/datacenters via License Mobility through Software Assurance.  Again, they would need the server license with SA.
  • Issue 4 – Collaboration tool – Transitioning to Office 365 E3 will give them access to Skype for Business Plan 2.
  • Issue 5 – Compliance and Legal Hold – Office 365 E3 will give them Exchange Online 2 which includes Legal Hold; archives email for more than 10 years.
  • Issue 6 – Agreement doesn’t expire. Since they have the ECAL, they can use the bridge CALs to transition from on premise to cloud for workloads not offered through Office 365 (Windows/SQL).

Thanks for reading,

CSP Man

Disclaimer

The purpose of this article is for informational purposes only.  The names are fictional and created by the author’s imagination.  Any name or resemblance is pure coincidental.

Office 365 Licensing

MS Licensing4 Comments

In order to understand a licensing program, it’s best to start at the beginning and go from there. Office 365 comes with various plans and product lines that can get a bit confusing to the average consumer.  In this post we will review Office 365 and Azure and the various programs to purchase them under.

Just purchased volume licensing and want to move to Office 365?  There’s a plan for that.  Need to buy the full license?  No problem.  Have Software Assurance (SA) and need to move to a User Subscription License (USL)?  Got it covered.  Here are 5 scenarios to help understand how to the licensing works.

Step-up-USL

John purchased an Office 365 E3 but really screwed up;  he really needed E5.  He’s midway through his agreement.  What does he need to do?  As long as he purchases the licenses under the same agreement, he can acquire a “Step-up USL” license at a cheaper rate than if he were to wait until his agreement ends and purchase E5 without the step-up discount.  Step-up USL is just a way to upgrade services during the term of the agreement. That’s a key fact to remember.  Step-ups expire when the step-up USL expires or the base USL expires (whichever expires earlier).

Add -on – USL

Bill is a bit of a nervous Nellie.  He has an on-premise volume licensing agreement but wants to try Office 365.  An Add-on-USL gives Bill the ability to migrate to Office 365 at a fraction of the cost.  This also must be purchased on the same agreement as the qualifying licenses.  In summary, it’s just a license that is purchased in addition to a previous acquired license at a fraction of the cost.

From SA USL

Mary is tired of managing licenses on premise.  She has an Enterprise Agreement (EA) and owns the Core CAL Suite.  She wants to move to the cloud, but wants to do it in the most cost-effective way possible.  Since she already purchased licenses with SA (a mandatory requirement when buying an EA), Microsoft recognizes (That’s nice of them) the investment they made with SA, and offers a discount to move to the cloud.  That discount is called “From SA USL”  Like everything else, you guessed it…it must all be purchased under the same agreement as they originally purchased under.

Full Blown License

Barbara hates Microsoft. For the past 10 years she has installed nothing but open software.  Her boss is tired of the incompatibility that comes with open source software and has recently told Barbara to either go to the Microsoft cloud or go home.  She decided to go Microsoft.  Since Barbara does not already own a Microsoft agreement (or any licenses for that matter) she must buy the Full USL license.  The Full USL is also applicable for those customers that let their agreement expire without migrating to the cloud prior.  Remember in the previous examples, all step-up, add-ons, and from SA must be purchased under the same agreement.

SAL for SA

This last example is not for everybody and is probably meant for a 500 level Office 365 licensing conversation.  That being said, I think it’s important to at least bring up.

Let’s say John bought Skype for Business USL license and for whatever reason his boss is hesitant about using Microsoft data centers.  Maybe it’s for disaster recovery or maybe there are compliance concerns (or maybe Barbara from the previous example went to work at John’s company 🙂 but regardless the reason, they do not want to use Microsoft.  How can they leverage their USL licenses but use another data center provider? It’s called SAL for SA.  The new data center provider can license through their Microsoft agreement a SAL (Subscriber Access License) that will allow John to leverage their existing USL license and pay a fraction of the cost.

There you have it.  Office 365 licensing 101.  The next post we will review the different products and plans to help you identify the right plan for you.

Thanks for reading,

CSP Man