Consolidating the Microsoft Volume Licensing Agreements of schools in a MAT...

[networkmanager]

Hello,

 

I wonder if someone is able to advise please.

 

We are looking to consolidate and therefore align the Microsoft Volume Licensing Agreements for all the schools within our MAT into a single agreement. To this end, our vendor advised that this can be done by nominating one of the agreements as the Master Agreement and then adding the others as and when they are due. However, they have also mentioned that we need to be renewing the Office365 for each of the schools annually so that each school can keep their email domains in Office365, as they do now. Otherwise Microsoft will only allow the use of a single email domain for all the schools within our O365 tenancy. This is where I got confused as to what this meant. In this regard, I have contacted Microsoft today to advise, but still awaiting a response. So I thought to see if anyone here has done the same thing, if there were any issues and how they went about this. It is a scary thought for all our schools to lose access to their email domains in O365 overnight.

 

Just in case, all our schools are under our MAT's O365 tenancy, but each school have their email domains registered there.

 

Thank you in anticipation.

Edited May 14, 2021 by networkmanager

[Boredguy]

If each of your schools had their own 365 Tenancy, then you would be restricted to the free service without a licence agreement (Which is normally just Outlook and not the Word/Excel part of Office)

 

However if I read it correctly, you already have a single 365 Tenancy with each of the schools e-mail domains within it? If so then it shouldn't matter as that main tenancy would be associated with your Trust Volume Licence agreement (be it OVS/CSP)

[Mako]

I am currently onboarding my school into a a MAT. Fortunately the MAT is also changing name, so a new domain and tenancy are on their way. We are drawing up a new MS licensing agreement that will create parity with all the exisitng, separate, agreements. That will then be tied to the new tenancy, and the old MS agreements will elapse.

 

This does mean a bit of financial overlap as we'll have to pay for some things twice (some agreements have just been renewed, schools have different renewal dates) but it will create a unified Trust licensing agreement.

 

If you already have a single tenancy, then as @Boredguy says, it should be a simple matter.

[networkmanager]

If each of your schools had their own 365 Tenancy, then you would be restricted to the free service without a licence agreement (Which is normally just Outlook and not the Word/Excel part of Office)

 

However if I read it correctly, you already have a single 365 Tenancy with each of the schools e-mail domains within it? If so then it shouldn't matter as that main tenancy would be associated with your Trust Volume Licence agreement (be it OVS/CSP)

 

Hi Boredguy,

 

Yes, that's correct. All schools are under a single 365 tenancy with each school having their email domains within it. Glad to know consolidating the agreements won't break anything.

Thank you.

[networkmanager]

I am currently onboarding my school into a a MAT. Fortunately the MAT is also changing name, so a new domain and tenancy are on their way. We are drawing up a new MS licensing agreement that will create parity with all the exisitng, separate, agreements. That will then be tied to the new tenancy, and the old MS agreements will elapse.

 

This does mean a bit of financial overlap as we'll have to pay for some things twice (some agreements have just been renewed, schools have different renewal dates) but it will create a unified Trust licensing agreement.

 

If you already have a single tenancy, then as @Boredguy says, it should be a simple matter.

 

Hi Mako,

Thank you for your comments. Happy to know you are also looking to do more or less the same thing. To avoid paying twice for some agreements, we've nominated the school agreement that will lapse at the end of the month to be the Master Agreement. The vendor will then rename this to the MAT's name. In the future, we can add other schools as and when their agreements lapse. Fortunately for us, this will be from September onwards. Will check with our vendor that the Master Agreement will be tied to the MAT's tenancy.

 

Thanks again.

[Boredguy]

I was basically discussing the similar MAT transfer with our licensing provider earlier even though we're not the lead school just to get the heads round it and make sure we knew where we were going with the licencing. Unlike you we've got the fun of creating a whole new 365 Tenancy which to migrate everything over to, but happy to have assisted with the sanity check.