Bye Bye 14.35pb & A1 Plus :(

[MYK-IT]

Sorry for the bad quality, some pics I took from Microsoft's presentation...

 

Timeline for changes

 

Implementing Storage Governance

Edited August 10, 2023 by MYK-IT

[dmj]

Altered the deal

[chris11256]

Is anyone else not seeing the new storage report in the admin portal? I can see usage repots, which show similar data. But not the storage report MS point you to.

[DavR]

Is anyone else not seeing the new storage report in the admin portal? I can see usage repots, which show similar data. But not the storage report MS point you to.

 

We don't have the new reports in ours yet.

 

I think we'll be OK on the storage side (currently all our SharePoint + OneDrive = about 1TB!) although I will look at storage quotas.

 

Damn shame about A1 Plus retiring though, I fought Microsoft support for months to get that added to our tenant. Does anyone know where that leaves OVS customers? We've got a couple of years left to run on ours. IIRC, you used to be able to ask your reseller to add your Office Pro Plus licenses to your tenant, which could be used in a similar way to the A1 Plus, but were a bit more limited. I'm hoping A1 + Office Pro Plus licensing can replace A1 Plus for us, with no extra purchase necessary.

[Tefters]

For those who didn't attend, the following website covers the 'Changes to storage offerings across Microsoft 365 Education' https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/education/products/Microsoft-365-Storage-Options

 

MATs who have a single M365 tenant (to cover all schools) raised concern, as (it currently stands) they would only get 100TB pool storage (to cover all schools); as opposed if they had an individual tenant per school each with 100TB of pooled storage.

 

Their example, that in Brazil, they have millions of free users (using A1/A1 Plus accounts and a lot of data) didn't go down to well, noting some commenting that does this mean UK EDU customers are footing the costs (of Brazilian users)???

 

Time to reduce those default 1024GB OneDrive quotas and add M365 Storage monitoring to your checklists.. https://admin.microsoft.com/#/storagemanagement/OneDrive

Are we footing the bill for Brazil, that's comical. Microsoft made it clear they don't care about money from EDU, its not even a worthy % income for them to even worry about. They simply want people to wake-up and start dealing with their data in smart ways instead of just dumping and dumping and dumping.

 

The TLDR is simply:

 

1. Clean up your data.

2. Stop taking the p*ss by dumping every single bit of data you have regardless of use case into Office365.

3. Setup tenants properly per school instead of bundling all schools into one.

4. Use a lot of the new features such as Online Archives in Exchange.

5. Set storage quota's like you would on an on-prem file server.

6. Archive old data that isn't really accessed but you want to keep for XYZ reasons into a cold storage solution much like paper archive boxes shoved into a cupboard/loft.

 

You cant blame Microsoft for this and are delusional if you thought it would last, I just wish they had the tools and reports ready before making the announcement.

Also they could do with smarter ways of communicating and making people aware of other functionality to offload data whether it be to archive or slow storage, data research storage etc etc... As it stands, Azure changes every bloody week and keeping up with it all on a normal day to day workload makes me cross eyed.

 

I would imagine a couple of reasons this is coming about is because of sustainability, cost, carbon footprint to name a few.

Edited August 10, 2023 by Tefters

[psydii]

Interestingly we've never seen the unlimited pool, ours was always reporting around to 100Tb. But now we see the new reports and accounting methods, we are about 50% of the way through our allocation. This makes sense as we previously had a SAN of similar size hosting everything. For us step one is going to be tidying up all the 'holds' we have on various mailboxes, onedrives and sharepoint sites due to the volume of SARs and investigations that keep crossing my desk.

 

We have a few very surprisingly chonky departments (English?!) who need a closer look, but after that the bulk of the sharepoint storage usage is well known to be from the photography department, and that will age out every three years or so. Fingers crossed we should be good.

 

Did anybody get the email from Adobe about the removal of Creative Cloud Storage from their edu offer?

[chris11256]

Realistically the storage side of thing's isn't an issue, we're only using 4 TB across Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive. It just means that we'll need to purchase Office 365 A3 to keep students able to install Office on personal devices.

[XiJ]

MS certainly took a lot of flack in the meeting but fronted up. Most people understand unlimited is never unlimited and MS even admitted they were partly at fault for the huge storage sets that are in use.

 

I think for most schools, it won’t be a huge issues. Some trusts may get to the limit but it should also force staff to really look at what data is really needed and be more prudent.

 

I agree timelines could be limited for some. And the FE / Uni / research institutions could be hardest hit.

 

I think I’d like to see some flexibility in the storage pool data limit while keeping the A3/A5 addition storage per user. It would be awful if people restored to multi tenant organisations.

[RobFuller]

Useful PDF Microsoft-365-Storage-Guidance.

 

Double whammy for organisations with large data sets as with the retirement of Classic Stream this summer all these videos are now being shifting into your pool usage too, although at least now we can back them up unlike before.

 

Edit: Fixed link

Edited August 10, 2023 by RobFuller

[Tefters]

Interestingly we've never seen the unlimited pool, ours was always reporting around to 100Tb. But now we see the new reports and accounting methods, we are about 50% of the way through our allocation. This makes sense as we previously had a SAN of similar size hosting everything. For us step one is going to be tidying up all the 'holds' we have on various mailboxes, onedrives and sharepoint sites due to the volume of SARs and investigations that keep crossing my desk.

 

We have a few very surprisingly chonky departments (English?!) who need a closer look, but after that the bulk of the sharepoint storage usage is well known to be from the photography department, and that will age out every three years or so. Fingers crossed we should be good.

 

Did anybody get the email from Adobe about the removal of Creative Cloud Storage from their edu offer?

 

Yup I got the Adobe mail.

 

So its storage on device or other cloud storage aka OneDrive. Its a shame because Adobe seemed reasonably priced for a few years with the user education licensing supplying local app installs, use on 3 concurrent devices, mobile device usage, browser apps and cloud storage but now they are removing that its lost quite a bit of value not to mention how will you be able to use the browser apps with no cloud storage?

[MartinT]

I went straight in and reset all personal OneDrives to 100GB limit. I could see that three members of staff were over the limit three weeks ago, and now there are none. I just left the Microsoft warning e-mails to percolate through the consciousness: self-managed cleaning works!

[ITGuyNW]

I've only just seen all this 100gb limit through a bulletin. Yikes.

[saintoctopus]

*bump*

 

How can we collectively put pressure on Microsoft to rethink? MATs and suchlike can't suddenly drop to 100TB - the fact we are multiple schools should trigger a larger pool of all the schools included in the tenant, surely?

[dmj]

*bump*

 

How can we collectively put pressure on Microsoft to rethink? MATs and suchlike can't suddenly drop to 100TB - the fact we are multiple schools should trigger a larger pool of all the schools included in the tenant, surely?

 

Microsoft already said that users shouldn't have believed their marketing departments 'unlimited' offer was genuine.

The damage is already done as far as they are concerned, Edu is such a tiny sector for them.

[psydii]

Schools contain over 10% of the population. I'm not sure that is small. Also remember the pandemic, when they buckled as little under the load of edu on boarding petabytes of data, and consuming so much server resource that they had to limit the resources available to business customers to keep edu and health care running? - we're noticeable, and that is why they have realised there is value to be extracted from our consumption of storage.

 

As a school with a relatively huge data foot print, 100Tb is enough for us, and an upgrade on the 40Tb SAN we migrated from.

 

If we were in a MAT made from multiple secondaries - 100Tb would absolutely not be enough, but we could easily absorb the half dozen local primaries into our current tenant.

 

I'm sure there will be movement on the limits for MATs. I would expect that the conversations have already started.... and there are usually a few senior/influential Microsoft staff at BETT if you utter the correct incantations (or have done your research so you recognise them!)

[Rob_D]

*bump*

How can we collectively put pressure on Microsoft to rethink? MATs and suchlike can't suddenly drop to 100TB - the fact we are multiple schools should trigger a larger pool of all the schools included in the tenant, surely?

Isn't MS's answer "simply" to stick to one school per tenancy? - yes i know moving data around like this is far from simple.

 

And I can sort of see the business argument of "if you're a big enough organisation to need more than 100TB of file storage then your big enough pay extra for it."

[Tefters]

Isn't MS's answer "simply" to stick to one school per tenancy? - yes i know moving data around like this is far from simple.

 

And I can sort of see the business argument of "if you're a big enough organisation to need more than 100TB of file storage then your big enough pay extra for it."

 

2nd this ^^^ People should not of setup full MAT's under 1 tenancy, each school is still its own entity just managed under 1 umbrella.

[Koldov]

Sorry I haven't read through all 42 posts, but just interested what you mean by goodbye A1+...?

 

I have a tenant, literally built on 'free' A1+ licenses... is this going to disappear/become unlicensed...?

 

Or does it mean it is no longer going to be 'offered' to new subscriptions as a license option?

[DavR]

A1 Plus licensing is being retired from next year, 1st August - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/office-365-a1-plus

 

You will be left with the basic A1 licensing, which will cover you for web, but not installation.

 

I'm in the same boat, my tenant is built on A1 Plus. I'm hoping that we can just load the Office Pro Plus licensing from our OVS into our tenant (I've seen it done before, resellers used to be able to do it) to cover the installation aspect. I don't fancy the extra whack to upgrade to A3.

[pete]

There was a recent mailshot (blog?) about making it easier* to work across N+1 tenancies:

 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/plan-multi-tenant-org-overview?view=o365-worldwide

 

https://practical365.com/multi-tenant-organization-m365/

 

*For values of up to 5 tenants. Currently in Preview. Possibly for a "Microsoft's house of perpetual musical chairs" value of easier.

[Tefters]

Love me some John Savill and he just posted a video on this also

Edited September 20, 2023 by Tefters

[saintoctopus]

For anyone annoyed by this, here's a way you can register your dissatisfaction by upvoting this post:

 

https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/0d228fbd-af9a-ee11-a81c-0022484f9f6d

[TechMonkey]

Just to be contrary, I think the guy who put that is a bit delusional. Did everyone really think we could just fill 30,000TB of space carefree? His organisation seems to have fallen for the "no need to manage your data" illusion and now paying the price.

[Rob_D]

Hey, the updated Storage Management page is working properly for us: https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home?#/storagemanagement

And it's showing the new, ~100TB limit. I feel reasonably confident that won't be a problem here (at least not for a long time).

[Tefters]

The guy needs sacking to be honest.

It's probably the same guy who was bitching at the end of the live webinar Microsoft did about how his Education institute was using Office 365 to store all their raw research data models and what not instead of using proper storage solution designed for that data.

 

This whole mentality of Education should get everything for free is stupid and jumped on this to save himself money he probably wasted elsewhere.

 

I have been spending the last 6 months slowly reigning in our storage usage through scripts, limits, archiving and some plain old cheeky deleting and I still have more work to do.

 

Education institutes do have the money, they just waste it in all the wrong places *looks at pile of broken iPads and the 6+ online learning resources purchased that all overlap each other that no-one properly uses*.

Edited December 21, 2023 by Tefters