In economics there is the concept of a free good. Over the past several years, using the free good analogy, Microsoft Partners participating in the cloud Essentials program were gifted 250+ Office 365 E3 licenses for internal use. It served my own small business well, as everyone had full licenses, including our college interns. As you know, the Office 365 E3 SKU is one of the most robust levels.
This “free good” came to an end on June 30th – the end of Microsoft’s fiscal year and a reset of the program. Cloud Essentials members have been incorporated into the Action Pack program, thus the reset for the program benefits. What it meant for “us” at SMB Nation was a bit of a flurry of activity to apply the new internal use limit of five (5) licenses down from 250 licenses. In reality, we needed to decide how to acquire a five additional licenses to support our ten business users. So first – the mechanics of the license redemption and second how I solved the problem.
It all started on the morning of June 30 with a service interruption notification as seen in Figure 1 (above). I logged onto the Office 365 and verified the license expiration to confirm the licenses had expired. So off to Action Pack I went to acquire my license codes for Office 365 E3, which resulted in the updated status in Figure 2. Next I followed the procedure in the Office 365 Console to apply the codes. It was fairly simple. Then I had to decide which users to apply the licenses to (the SMB Nation management team). As you can see – I was a few licenses short (see Figure 2 below). Because I’m on the “E” plan, I’m allowed to purchase the licenses at different “E” levels. So our other employees, lower-level callers, can use E1 for simple e-mail and to work with Microsoft CRM Online, a tool we use.
Fast forward the movie – and we have five Office 365 E3 licenses from the Action Pack subscription and then we pay $8/month per E1 license for the other employees. I investigated with Microsoft if there were any discounts for purchasing Office 365 licenses for partners. I swear I saw “language” that partners could purchase additional Office 365 for a discount and somewhere I believe I read that it was through Volume Licensing (VL). The deeper I looked into this, there was no indication “where” you would actually make the purchase of the discounted licenses and apply it to Office 365.
So my next attempt to purchase discounted Office 365 licenses involved opening a support incident with Microsoft. A support technician, Chris, researched this for me and replied that the only offer right now concerns discounted Microsoft CRM Online licenses. Her reply was “I was able to verify that at this moment we do not have any offers available for discounts regarding Office 365, we do have a discount offer but it is only for Dynamics CRM Online. Unfortunately you will need to continue paying these licenses at full retail price.”
In my next blog on this topic, I’ll share news from the Microsoft WPC conference where it might be loosening up the licensing allocation. That is – you might be able to get more licenses shortly.
Keep reading…
