Following Microsoft’s Ignite 2025 conference, they have announced some feature additions to Microsoft 365…and some price increases to go along with it. Copilot Chat This free entry point to Copilot, included with various Microsoft products, will have new features to work with Outlook inboxes and calendars and standard access to Agent Mode. There will also be additional management and security capabilities around Copilot Chat.

Microsoft released SQL Server 2025 on November 18th 2025 and updated the Product Terms. However, the update has caused confusion and consternation amongst the Microsoft community - as it seems to suggest that failover rights as a Software Assurance benefit have been removed!!! 😱 (Spoiler alert - it's almost certain they haven't). If you're not familiar with this right it means, in a nutshell, that organisations who purchase SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance (SA) may license additional servers at no extra cost, as long as those servers are used only for disaster recovery/failover purposes.

SQL Server 2025 has been released and, while the licensing model remains the same, there are few changes worthy of note: Developer now comes in "Standard" and "Enterprise" versions. SQL Server Standard max compute capacity per instance increased from 24 to 32 cores SQL Server Standard max buffer memory increased from 128GB to 256GB SQL Server Express now supports a 50GB database size…

Microsoft have announced the Agent Pre-Purchase Plan (P3) – a new unified offer that covers both Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry services with one pool of credits. How is the Agent Pre-Purchase Plan priced? This annual commitment has 3 pricing tiers: And covers a range of services: Note the asterisks as always - some things are in preview and all are subject to change.

Microsoft Security Copilot uses Security Compute Units (SCU) to measure the compute power used to run various workloads. A quantity of these is now available with Microsoft 365 E5 licenses, rollout starting from November 18th 2025.. What SCU capacity is included with Microsoft 365 E5 licenses? Each Microsoft 365 E5 license includes 0.4 SCU so, for example, an organisation with 1,000 M365 E5 licenses will have 400 SCU per month.

AI Builder Credits have been around for a while as a way of paying for AI features within various Microsoft products including Power Apps Premium, Power Automate Premium, Dynamics 365 Finance and more. They're being replaced by Copilot Credits and that means the seeded AI Builder Credits, where they came bundled along with other licenses, are disappearing. From November 1, 2025 new customers - those who didn't already have some AI Capacity add-ons - cannot buy any...but can still buy new Premium licenses that come bundled with AI Credits.

It’s been rumoured for a while that Microsoft would release a new product/license for AI Agents called Agent 365 and we have the first public acknowledgement of this from Redmond. Microsoft 365 Message MC1183300 is titled “Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot: Discover and create agentic users from Teams and M365 Agent Store” and gives us some initial information.

Satya Nadella now refers to Microsoft “building a planet-scale cloud and AI factory” which, with the recent agreement with Open AI, including $250 billion of Azure services (these don’t impact the Q1 results), and Copilot, shows they’re not changing direction any time soon. Is Microsoft Copilot successful? Lots of talk in the earnings call about Copilot growth and success with 90% of the Fortune 500 using M365 Copilot and various organisations purchasing 15,000+ seats in Q1 and PWC purchasing 155,000 seats.

Photo by energepic.com on Pexels.com Microsoft are moving more and more towards consumption billing for their products - right across the portfolio. This makes it much more difficult for customer organisations to predict and forecast usage, which will generally lead to over-commitment and uncertainty. It also, however, means that Microsoft's revenues and product sales are less predictable, which isn't what they want.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com Some Azure AI terms added around "the use of First-Party Consumption services and the use of Web Knowledge Sources while using Grounding with Bing services". Microsoft 365 E3 added as the prerequisite for Microsoft eDiscovery Graph API Standard Terms added following the recent updates around Teams: "This Notice applies to customers in the European Economic Area (EEA) who purchase through Microsoft’s commercial licensing programs with a billing account that is in the EEA.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com More name changes to keep us all busy! Rebranded Microsoft 365 E5 Security (and all relevant offers) to Microsoft Defender SuiteRebranded Microsoft E5 Compliance (and all relevant offers) to Microsoft Purview Suite M365 E5 Security = Microsoft Defender SuiteM365 E5 Compliance = Microsoft Purview Suite M365 F5 Security = Microsoft Defender Suite FLW…

Microsoft have a new (currently in preview) service to give more visibility into your Azure Blob storage. Azure Storage Discovery will: Measure how much data is stored across all storage accounts Identify regions experiencing the highest growth Find opportunities to reduce costs by locating infrequently used data Assess whether storage configurations align with security and compliance best practices Storage is often a source of hidden spend (and waste) in the cloud, so this may well be a useful weapon in your arsenal.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com Visual Studio Subscriptions have been added to MCA Windows 10 ESU added to CSP Microsoft Defender & Microsoft Purview Suites have now been made available to Business Premium users That last point is very interesting as this brings a world of new security features to smaller organisations - which will have multiple impacts: 1) directly increase the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of SMB customers as they buy new add-ons…

BIG Microsoft news! Are you a Microsoft EA customer with Online Services at Level B, C, or D pricing? From November 1st, 2025: "Microsoft will expand the set of products that have a single consistent price across Price Levels A-D to include all online services" on EA and MPSA agreements." The new pricing will be the same as on the Microsoft site.

Exchange Server 2016 & 2019 and Skype for Business Server 2016 & 2019 go out of support in October 2025 (4 months at the time of writing). The new Subscription editions have been announced as Generally Available by Microsoft (although not yet added to the Product Terms) but not all organisations are ready to make the move. To help with that, from August 1st, 2025, customers can contact their Microsoft account teams to purchase a 6-month Extended Security Update (ESU).

I get a lot of questions about ITAM, SaaS, & FinOps tools - what is available, what do they do, which are the best etc. The ITAM market has quite a few tools, there are several SaaS tools, and the FinOps tool market is huge...unnecessarily so some may say. This presents (at least) 2 problems: Potential customers are overwhelmed and don't know where to start…

With the upcoming release of SQL Server 2025, there will not be a new version of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Instead, Power BI Report Server will be the default - offering new features including PBIX reports, data modelling, and custom visuals. The Microsoft announcement states that "when SQL Server 2025 becomes generally available, any customer with a paid SQL Server license will have access to Power BI Report Server…

Microsoft announce new cloud options for Europe. There is an increasing push back from European organisations, particularly Government, against so many critical services and so much data all being run out of the US...this has been accelerated by the current geo-political situation too. These announcements are Microsoft's attempt to pre-emptively stem the flow of European customers away from their cloud services.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com It's the Microsoft Product Terms for June 2025 and, as you'd expect in the last month of the FY, not too much has changed. Clarification that it's Cloud Add-ons to SA that must be acquired on the same agreement as the base license…rather than all SLs that have a pre-requisite license. Azure App Service plan added to MCA.

Do you use Microsoft Global Secure Access? Did you know you have an allocation of Microsoft remote network bandwidth? Each license of: Microsoft Entra ID P1 Microsoft Entra Internet Access Microsoft Entra Suite contributes towards the total as so: If you need additional bandwidth, there is now a Remote Network Bandwidth SKU you can purchase.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com Microsoft have made a few changes this month: Added "hidden offer products" to MCA Availability tables - these seem to include: M365 Cross-tenant User Data Migration Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management Add-on to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for Servers Viva Glint VDA Add-on for M365 E3/E5 USL M365 Apps for Enterprise Workplace Analytics Numbers 2, 4, and 7 may not be available "

Microsoft have announced 3-year subscription terms on CSP for: 1) Microsoft 365 E3 (with and without Teams) 2) Microsoft 365 E5 (with and without Teams) 3) Microsoft Teams Enterprise 4) Microsoft 365 E5 Security 5) Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance Numbers 1, 2, and 3 will be available from June 1, 2025 while 4 & 5 will come on July 1, 2025.

Microsoft Purview is a suite of products focused on data security, governance, and compliance across the Microsoft portfolio. Microsoft first introduced Pay As You Go (PAYG) aka Consumption SKUs for Purview in January 2025 and now, from May 1, 2025 there are a new set. These new SKUs are aimed at protecting "your data as it moves across networks and through GenAI applications…

Hotpatching - the ability to install patch updates without needing to restart the server - has been available in Microsoft Azure for a while. It is now coming to on-premises Windows Server 2025 machines...for a fee. This new capability requires connection to Azure Arc and is currently free in preview but, from July 1 2025, it will cost $1.50 per core per month.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com Frontline Worker Use Rights have moved to the Universal Terms for Online Services from product specific pages A new definition for “Frontline Worker License” has been introduced in the Glossary "Frontline Worker License means a license for a Microsoft Product designated with an “F”, “FLW”, or “Frontline” as identified in the Product Conditions table of product specific terms, which are subject to the Eligibility to Assign Frontline Worker Licenses terms in the Universal License Terms for all Online Services."