Suite Licensing – Identify Licensing Options Available in Microsoft 365

Suite Licensing

Many Microsoft 365 products are available as part of a suite. You’re likely already familiar with many of the licenses and subscriptions in this book, such as Microsoft 365 E3 or Office 365 E5 (as discussed in Chapter 1, Describe the Different Types of Cloud Services Available). Microsoft licensing and offerings change frequently, so it’s best to bookmark a few resources that you can use to check for the most current and up-to-date bundles and features.

You can find the most current product feature licensing matrix, including standalone, suite, and add-on products, at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2139145.

Exam Tip

Additionally, the website https://m365maps.com provides a great view into what licenses and features are available across the individual services and suites. While not an official Microsoft resource, it is updated and maintained by a Microsoft employee.

Sovereign Clouds

Microsoft offers suites grouped together in the following verticals:

• Commercial

• Education and nonprofit

• Government

Some of the licenses and features are served out of different sovereign clouds (for example, commercial, education, and nonprofit customers are served out of one sovereign cloud, while the US Government has multiple sovereign clouds for different security and compliance levels).

• Identify Licensing Options Available in Microsoft 365

When choosing subscription options, it’s important to consider a number of factors:

• If you are subscribing to an instance that resides in a commercial cloud, you can mix and match subscriptions from other business units that exist in the same cloud.

• Microsoft Government Community Cloud(GCC), Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and Government Community Cloud Department of Defense (GCC-DOD) each reside in their own separate environments. Licenses and subscriptions can only be provisioned that match the type of cloud you’re provisioned in.

•   Microsoft GCC subscriptions are only available to qualified public sector customers (i.e., state, municipal, or federal government customers and certain contractors required to comply with federal contracting and security requirements).

• Not all features are available in all clouds. For example, features and services typically appear first in the worldwide commercial cloud. Features and services must go through additional testing and validation regiments such as the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) before being enabled in GCC clouds.

Review your organization’s needs, requirements, and eligibility to guide your choice of the correct tenant environment. Once you have provisioned a tenant, the only way to change your tenant’s name or tenant type is to re-provision the tenant and migrate any existing content.