Effective July 2021, a lightweight version of the Visio web app is available for Microsoft 365.

This version offers core Visio functionalities and allows business users to create and edit professional Visio diagrams effortlessly and collaborate with others by sharing diagrams seamlessly.

Visio has long been available only as a standalone app for purchase. Now, this lightweight version of the Visio web app is available, at no additional cost, to users licensed with Microsoft 365 Business Basic/Standard/Premium, Office 365 E1/E3/E5/F3, Microsoft 365 F3/E3/E5, and Microsoft 365 Apps for business/enterprise licenses.

For the announcement, please visit: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/06/09/bringing-visio-to-microsoft-365-diagramming-for-everyone/.

For more information on Visio, please visit: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/microsoft-365/visio/flowchart-software.

Please contact us for more information and to request a quote.

Effective May 3, 2021, Microsoft 365 Calling Plans are available in additional countries, including Luxembourg.

Microsoft Calling Plans allows Microsoft Teams users to call regular phones from within their Microsoft product. This allows both the use of Microsoft Phone System with Calling Plan to connect to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), and the connection to other Microsoft Teams users within one environment.

There are two Calling Plans options:

• Domestic Calling Plan: Licensed users can call out to numbers located in the country where they are assigned in Microsoft 365 (e.g. Luxembourg).
• Domestic and International Calling Plan: Licensed users can call out to numbers located in the country where their Microsoft 365 license is assigned to, and to international numbers in 196 countries.

In Luxembourg, there are four plan options available per calendar month:

• 120 minute Domestic Calling Plan
• 240 minute Domestic Calling Plan
• 1200 minute Domestic Calling Plan
• Domestic and International Calling Plan: 1200 minutes of domestic -OR- 600 minutes of international calling (whichever is reached first in the calendar month)

Outbound calls to premium numbers are not supported at this time.

This launch will expand the availability of Calling Plans to 10 new markets across the EMEA and APAC regions. The APAC markets are Singapore and New Zealand. The EMEA markets are Luxembourg, Romania, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and Slovakia.

For additional information on Calling Plans for Microsoft 365, please visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/calling-plans-for-office-365.

For a list of the 196 countries included in the Domestic and International Calling Plan, please visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/country-and-region-availability-for-audio-conferencing-and-calling-plans/users-can-make-outbound-calls-to-these-countries-and-regions.

For more information of availability in Luxembourg, including Calling Plans, please visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/country-and-region-availability-for-audio-conferencing-and-calling-plans/availability-in-luxembourg.

For further information on Microsoft Calling Plans in general, please visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/calling-plan-landing-page.

Effective March 15, 2021, Microsoft 365 Business Premium includes Antivirus management and Universal Print capabilities.

Microsoft Defender Antivirus provides your PCs with robust antimalware protection. The new Active Threats page of that antivirus management experience has been rolling out for the past few months and is now available to all customers worldwide.

Universal Print is a Microsoft 365 subscription-based service that allows IT to manage printers directly through the Universal Print portal, without the need for on-premises print servers. For organizations that are committed to Microsoft 365, it replaces the Windows Server print server functionality.

For the announcement, please visit: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/small-and-medium-business-blog/new-in-microsoft-365-business-premium-antivirus-management-and/ba-p/2212333.

For more information on Microsoft Defender Antivirus, please visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/threats-detected-defender-av?view=o365-worldwide.

For more information on Universal Print, please have a look at this article: https://www.schneider.im/microsoft-universal-print/.

Effective June 9, 2021, Microsoft 365 Scheduler Per User is available.

Scheduler enables users to delegate their scheduling tasks to a digital personal assistant – Cortana, including scheduling appointments and meetings with internal and external attendees.

To use Scheduler, cc: Cortana in an email with other people and ask to schedule a meeting by letting Cortana know your meeting needs in the body of the email. You can tell Cortana the duration, timing, or location, or simply say “Find a time for us.”, and since Cortana understands natural language, there are no special commands to use.

Scheduler service is available worldwide, but language support will be limited to English.

Microsoft 365 Scheduler can be licensed through Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and Volume License (VL).

For more information on Microsoft 365 Scheduler, please visit: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/scheduler.

Effective May 1, 2021, Microsoft 365 Career Coach is available for Microsoft Teams for Education.

Career Coach is a Microsoft Teams app, powered by LinkedIn, that provides personalized guidance to higher education students on navigating their career journey. Institutions can offer a unified employability solution to help every student discover their path, identify and acquire skills, and build their network.

Microsoft 365 Career Coach can be licensed through Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and Volume License (VL).

For the announcement, please visit: https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2021/03/introducing-career-coach-in-microsoft-teams-for-education/.

For an informational eBook on Career Coach, please visit: https://edudownloads.azureedge.net/msdownloads/Career_Coach_eBook.pdf.

For a demonstration of the usage of Career Coach, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd5R7HmVcJQ.

On April 22, 2021 from 6 to 9pm Luxembourgish time, you may join the free virtual event: “Higher education Reimagined”, during which Career Coach will be presented: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/training-and-events/events-calendar#/events/HigherEducationReimagined.

Prior to Smart Provisioning, Microsoft provided customers with licenses that were not purchased. This was done to avoid interruptions in Microsoft 365 services as the customer stepped up and assigned licenses. These unused overages caused a compliance risk, so they’re being removed from the system to protect the customer and help them return to parity with what they have purchased. To avoid programmatically unintended license consumption, an updated License Overallocation process, formerly referred to as Smart Provisioning, was introduced in October 2019.

Beginning April 1, 2021, Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers with agreements created prior to October 25, 2019 will see the removal of unused overages made available prior to the updated overallocation process.

For customers who haven’t transacted a qualifying license transition order, any existing (fixed-value) unused overallocation will be reset to zero from early April 2021. Customers need to do the following to prepare for the change:

• If customers only assign licenses using the Microsoft 365 Admin Center user interface, this message is for awareness only.
• If customers use license assignment workflow automation, for example via PowerShell scripting, and their automation logic permits assigning more licenses than they own, they’ll need to update the automation logic to avoid an overallocation.
• To avoid potential process failure, customers should update the automation logic before early April 2021.
• Note that already licensed users won’t see any loss in or impact on their service.
• If customers use group-based licensing, they should periodically verify that the available licenses are adequate for their group membership counts.
• If customers anticipate having an insufficient number of licenses to meet their needs, they might be able to place a license reservation on the Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center or place an order though their reseller.

For more information on licensing, including license reservations, please visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/license-faq.

Please contact us for more information.

Effective February 18, 2021, Microsoft 365 E3 offers a variety of new features combining best-in-class productivity apps with core security and compliance capabilities.

New management capabilities are:

• Microsoft Tunnel virtual private network (VPN) capabilities, extending Conditional Access to workers to use Android and iOS devices to remotely access on-premises data – a key principle of Zero Trust security.
• Broadened endpoint management, including adding support for virtual desktops and kiosks and shared devices, in addition to Windows PCs, Macs, and mobile devices.
• Expanded MacOS management to deliver more apps securely, collect better telemetry to improve management decisions, and improve security with enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) and file encryption.
• Endpoint analytics to help you understand how performance and health issues with your organization’s hardware and software may be impacting your end-user’s productivity. Further, Endpoint analytics connects insights from Productivity Score with Microsoft Endpoint Manager to ensure everyone can do their best work with Microsoft 365.
• Unified endpoint security management that reduces the friction between end-user computing teams and security operations by providing deep integration between Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, as well as enabling specialized security roles for security managers to view and manage their day-to-day tasks within the Configuration Manager Console.
• Modernize your IT by bringing intelligent security value to all endpoints, whether managed on-premises or as managed service.

Effective July 1, 2021, the prices of Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) E3 and of Intune increase. The price for Microsoft 365 E3 remains the same.

For the announcement, please visit: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/enabling-remote-work-and-new-scenarios-with-microsoft-365-e3/ba-p/2118541.