February 24, 2025
WHAT'S HAPPENING: IMPORTANT REMINDER: Changes to CSP Billing & Price Increase on Select Products Coming Soon
WHEN: April 1, 2025
As previously announced, Starting April 1, 2025, all new and renewing monthly billing plans on CSP for annually committed subscriptions will be priced 5% higher than the annual billing option for annual subscription plans. Customers can switch from monthly to annual billing for their annual subscription at their renewal date. Also on April 1, Microsoft will be implementing a price increase on Power BI Pro, Power BI Premium Per User, and Teams Phone.
WHAT'S HAPPENING: Power BI Premium Capacity SKUs Retired in Favour of Microsoft Fabric
WHEN: February 1, 2025
As of February 1, 2025, customers with Power BI Premium per capacity will no longer be able to renew these SKUs. This is because Microsoft is retiring the Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs (P-SKUs) in favor of Fabric capacities, which offer a more integrated and comprehensive data platform experience. Power BI is only one of several workloads included in Fabric:
Power BI connects to your data sources, visualize, and discover what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.
Databases are a developer-friendly transactional database such as Azure SQL Database, which allows you to easily create your operational database in Fabric. Using the mirroring capability, you can bring data from various systems together into OneLake. You can continuously replicate your existing data estate directly into Fabric's OneLake, including data from Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Databricks, Snowflake, and Fabric SQL database.
Data Factory provides a modern data integration experience to ingest, prepare, and transform data from a rich set of data sources. It incorporates the simplicity of Power Query, and you can use more than 200 native connectors to connect to data sources on-premises and in the cloud. Industry Solutions addresses unique industry needs and challenges, and include data management, analytics, and decision-making.
Real-time Intelligence is an end-to-end solution for event-driven scenarios, streaming data, and data logs. It enables the extraction of insights, visualization, and action on data in motion by handling data ingestion, transformation, storage, analytics, visualization, tracking, AI, and real-time actions.
Data Engineering provides a Spark platform with great authoring experiences. It enables you to create, manage, and optimize infrastructures for collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing vast data volumes.
Data Science enables you to build, deploy, and operationalize machine learning models from Fabric. It integrates with Azure Machine Learning to provide built-in experiment tracking and model registry to enrich organizational data with predictions and integrate those predictions into BI reports.
Data Warehouse provides industry leading SQL performance and scale. It separates compute from storage, enabling independent scaling of both components. Additionally, it natively stores data in the open Delta Lake format.
WHAT'S HAPPENING: DeepSeek R1 Availability in Azure AI Foundy and GitHub
WHEN: January 29, 2025
The DeepSeek R1 model has recently been released on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub. It is available via a serverless endpoint through the model catalog in Azure AI Foundry. On GitHub, you can explore additional resources and step-by-step guides to integrate DeepSeek R1 seamlessly into your applications. Customers will even be able to use distilled flavors of the DeepSeek R1 model to run locally on their Copilot+ PCs. This post has more details on how to get started.
WHAT'S HAPPENING: Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat Announced
WHEN: January 15, 2025
Microsoft has launched Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, a new feature that introduces pay-as-you-go agents to the existing free chat service for Microsoft 365 commercial users. It offers: a free, secure AI chat powered by GPT-4o, agents accessible direct through the chat, and IT controls including enterprise data protection and agent management.
Usage of agents is measured in “messages” and total cost is calculated based on the sum of messages used by your organization. These messages can be purchased as a pay-as-you-go option in Azure for $0.01/message, or via pre-paid message packs priced at $200 USD for 25,000 messages/month. You can read more about calculating agents costs here.
WHAT'S HAPPENING: Viva Goals To Be Retired
WHEN: December 31, 2015
Microsoft will be retiring Viva Goals at the end of 2025. Microsoft will not be replacing Viva Goals with another solution or integrating its features into other products. Users will have access to Viva Goals and their data until December 31, 2025, or until their licenses expire, whichever comes first. After this date, Viva Goals will no longer be accessible. Integrations between Viva Goals and other tools (for example, Teams, Azure DevOps) will remain functional until December 31, 2025. After that, these integrations will cease to operate. Viva Goals offers data export features via API, Excel, and PowerPoint, allowing users to move their data to a solution of their choice.
WHAT'S HAPPENING: Microsoft Entra ID Governance for Guests Release
WHEN: Q2 of 2025
The Entra ID Governance for guests add-on is now scheduled for release in the second quarter of 2025. This will be billed at $0.75 USD per monthly governed identity. Only features specific to Microsoft Entra ID Governance are eligible to be billed through the ID Governance for guests add-on, features included in Entra ID P2 will not be billed, and only for users with UserType of Guest. Billing will be consumptive and charged based on usage every month. A single guest user identity that has a governance action applied in any month will only incur one $0.75 charge each month, regardless of the number of governance actions performed for that user in that month.
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