Microsoft 365: Licensing illustration

Now with all the Cloud offerings which Microsoft provides to their customers/users, it has become a little more important to understand few terminologies around Licensing. The primary ones for me were: 

1. Organizations 
2. Subscriptions
3. Licenses
4. User accounts
5. and Tenants

Where an Organization could be any Business entity. Let's take the example as Walmart is an Organization. 

And a Subscription is an agreement the Walmart made with Microsoft, the terms, the agreed price, the offers/rebates from Microsoft and till what time the Subscription is valid - all such elements are covered under this.

Now Licenses are needed on top of Subscription (sometimes subscription comes along with certain number of free/included licenses). So whenever a license under a particular subscription is allocated to a Walmart user, only that he/she can use the Cloud offering. 

So that explains what User accounts consist of - Users and user groups within the Active directory of Walmart are the user accounts, and they are needed for assigning a license (under a subscription)

And finally Tenant, this is something which determines the Regional location that will house the servers providing the Cloud services which are part of the subscription purchased. 

The AAD tenant for Walmart could be spread across the globe, so let's say, if Walmart has their head office in West USA - they would have the Head office users held in TENANT2:West USA. And suppose that Walmart is opening up a new branch office in Nordics then they would get a new instance of Azure AD tenant containing the organization User accounts for Nordics. And all the cloud services which are part of Walmart's subscription agreement with Microsoft would also be now available from this new TENANT1: North Europe. 

Another important thing to note is that all the User accounts for Cloud offerings are to be held in Azure Active directory and if there are any local user accounts using legacy Active directory domain services (ADDS) - those will have to be synced with AAD. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Subscription: 

I am not providing any details specifically about D365FO here for a reason - there has been lot of changes in the Licensing for Dynamics during July and onwards - so best to get the latest from Microsoft.        

However, if you (or) your customer as an Organization has D365FO subscription, then the minimum user licenses count = 20. And that includes the following:

1. FastTrack onboarding support/meeting
2. One PRODUCTION environment
3. One Tier 2 UAT environment
4. One Tier 1 DEV / BUILD / TEST environment 

However, Production environment will be available later in the Implementation Project timeline, after the Readiness assessment, which includes

1. For you to upload the "Usage profile" to Microsoft
2. Code and Configuration readiness (discussion with MS)
3. Customer's UAT signed off

Tip: Production is always sized by Microsoft, and the way you can influence the sizing decision is by providing most accurate Usage profile (includes peak-hour transaction and numbers and many more) and by providing the output (telemetry data) of your Performance testing on a Production-like (maybe Tier-5 environment). So please make appropriate plans for these two in your project timeplan. 

I will write a separate blog in order to explain the new approach for Dynamics Subscriptions and subscription model. That's it for now.