Microsoft license

We all know the feeling of having a subscription to a service like Netflix or the gym. Microsoft licenses work in the same way. It’s a recurring subscription that you either pay for monthly or yearly. By paying the agreed-upon amount, you get a license and the right to use the product(s) you have bought the license for.

However, Microsoft is surprisingly generous. By purchasing one type of license, you often get access to many products in a bundle. Take some of the most popular licenses from Microsoft:

• Microsoft 365 Business Standard
• Microsoft 365 Business Premium
• Dynamics 365 Sales Professional
• Dynamics 365 Business Central
• Microsoft Power BI

This is just a small sample of the 1600+ licenses that Microsoft offers. Therefore, it’s a big task to manage licenses and understand the user’s needs for which licenses can solve the various challenges that the company may face.

It’s always a good idea to turn to MicroPartner for license advice. MicroPartner is a Microsoft Gold Partner and has been involved in the Microsoft license transition since the beginning.

With so many different licenses, Microsoft still tries to keep it relatively simple by creating categories or areas that can be seen in their naming conventions:

• Office 365
• Dynamics 365
• Microsoft 365
• Power Apps

However, there are some licenses that contain products that cut across these categories.

The best example is if you take Microsoft 365 Business Standard, which includes the following:

• Word
• Excel
• Outlook
• Teams
• SharePoint
• OneDrive

Where Excel, Word, and Outlook are part of Office 365, but Teams and SharePoint are part of Microsoft 365.

Furthermore, as not many people know, there are many Power Apps features that bind all the products together and become available as soon as you have a license. Here, Flow (read Power Apps – Flows if you want to know more) can be mentioned.

Even if you have a license that gives you access or you think you get a specific product with a license, you still need to read the fine print, as there are two sides to this.

For this, we can take the example of “Microsoft 365 Business Basic”.

It states that you get the entire Office package, Word, Excel, etc. But it’s only available on mobile devices and web versions. So you can’t download and use Word on your own computer, but you can open and work on your Word documents on the web and on your phone.

Similarly, if we take “Dynamics 365 Team Member”.

This license can be seen as a viewing license. The entire Dynamics is a large world and can be costly if many people need to use it. Therefore, “Team Member” exists. With this, a user can access and see the necessary information, but has limited access such as not being able to delete content or create content.