Microsoft Campus Agreement 2021-202x

Note: The information below is incomplete, however it is the best currently available as of 02/17/2021. Check back regularly for updates.

Overview

Microsoft has changed the licensing structure for many services and products it provides to the University of Washington. The UW is contractually obligated to comply with applicable license and pricing changes, which go into effect on June 1, 2021. This year is significant as it marks the end of our previous 3 year agreement, a new agreement of as yet to be determined length will need to be signed. The situation is fluid and information will be posted to this site as significant decisions are made.

Some Microsoft services and product licenses are, and will continue to be, funded centrally with support from the UW-IT Technology Recharge fee, while other services are, or will be, purchased by and/or billed directly to the departments or users that need them.

The most notable change so far for 2021 will be the deprecation of the on-prem licensing of Visio and Project. Due to escalating costs and diminishing functionality, we are dropping these products from the contract in favor of providing access to the subscription based licensing Microsoft is using going forward. Click on these links for information about Visio Plan 2 and Project Plan 3 and 5.
Student staff will now excluded from the Education Qualified User (EQU) headcount. This primarily affects user counts and not the end user experience, no experiential changes are expected at this time.

Microsoft Campus Agreement 2019-2021

Overview

Microsoft has changed the licensing structure for many services and products it provides to the University of Washington, moving from a site license based on headcount to a named user license. The UW is contractually obligated to comply with applicable license and pricing changes, which go into effect on June 1, 2019.

Note: The information below is incomplete, however it is the best currently available. Check back regularly for updates.

How do Microsoft licensing changes affect you/your department?

For end users there will be very little change in the user experience; most should not notice a change at all. For IT professionals there are several changes to be aware of, as detailed below.

On This Page:

Microsoft 365 A3
Microsoft Office Suite for Windows
Microsoft Office for Mac
Office 365 Suite
Premium Services
On Premise Server Licenses & CALs
Microsoft EMS E3

Microsoft 365 A3

Microsoft 365 A3 includes quite a few licenses, most notably including:

Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise
Office 365 A3 (Exchange Online (Plan 2), Sharepoint Online (Plan 2), Microsoft Teams, and more)
Enterprise EMS 3
Azure Information Protection P1
Intune

All UW employees and student user account are eligible for Microsoft 365 A3. Additional user accounts may become eligible via provisioning–see itconnect.uw.edu/tools-services-support/software-computers/productivity-platforms/provisioning-request-tool/.

Microsoft Office Suite for Windows

Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise (was Office 365 ProPlus) will continue to be available via the Microsoft 365 A3 license and will always be the most feature-rich, up-to-date version of the Office Suite.

Office Professional Plus 2019 will continue to be delivered through UWare and activated via KMS for UW-owned equipment. Microsoft is not providing MSI as a deployment methodology for Office Professional Plus 2019, however, and is instead providing the Office Deployment Tool.

Office Professional 2016 will continue to be delivered through UWare as an MSI file and activated via campus KMS for UW-owned equipment.

** Both Office 2019 and 2016 are feature-locked and will not receive new feature updates, just security patches. Click here to see the differences between Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise and Office 2019.

Microsoft Office for Mac

Office 2019 and Office 2016 will continue to be delivered through UWare for UW-owned equipment.

Office 365 Suite

For most users of Office 365 there will be little or no change in the user experience. There may be additional Office 365 functionality available in the future but details are still being determined.

For current users of the Office 365 premium services listed below, there may be significant changes to the way premium services are licensed and/or accessed. Please read on for more information. Additional information about these changes will also be provided to premium service users on a targeted basis in the coming months.

Premium Services

Project Online Server Services

SharePoint Online web sites that have been expanded with the Project Online Service require special Client Access Licenses (CAL) to access sets of features on those sites. Microsoft had previously granted a licensing equivalent of the Premium CAL for these services as a benefit of our purchase of the Project Desktop client distributed through UWare. Starting June 1, 2019, Microsoft is no longer providing this benefit which may leave customers without adequate access rights.

Users will be downgraded on or around June 1, 2019, to a Project Online Essentials license which only supplies licensing rights to do task time tracking and viewing.

Visio Desktop Client

UW-owned equipment: The Visio desktop client will continue to be delivered through UWare/Enterprise Software service and activated via campus KMS for UW-owned equipment, as it currently is today.

BYOD access: Will not be offered as a generally available offering or on per user basis until a unified UW-IT recharge service is in place.

Visio Online

Visio Online (aka Visio web app) is being removed from UW’s Office 365 environment to its own separate purchase. UW users will no longer be able to edit Visio via a web browser after September 30, 2019. They will continue to be able to read documents online.

Edit access will not be offered as a generally available offering or on per user basis until a unified UW-IT recharge service is in place to allow the recharge of Visio Plan 1.

Microsoft 365 A5

This premium license suite includes two license SKUs:

Office 365 A5
EMS A5

Each of these license SKUs has a variety of possible license plans included; however, UW-IT is not ready to support all capabilities at this time. What is listed here is what UW-IT plans to initially support:

Azure Information Protection Premium P2
Skype for Business/Teams Dial-in Conferencing
Power BI Pro
Customer Lock Box
Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection (limited features)

To find out more about possible capabilities, please contact UW-IT at help@uw.edu for more information.

On-premises Microsoft Server Licenses and Client Access Licenses

The following products are covered under the campus agreement, via the Enrollment for Server Platform, Academic benefits (unless otherwise noted):

Windows Server
System Center Configuration Manager
System Center Operations Manager
System Center Orchestrator
System Center Virtual Machine Manager
System Center Service Manager
System Center Data Protection Manager
Exchange Server (CALs are covered via the Office 365 A3, see eligibility)
SharePoint Server (CALs are covered via the Office 365 A3, see eligibility)
Lync Server (CALs are covered via the Office 365 A3, see eligibility)
Windows RDS CALs for employees (Students are not covered)

For each of these products, the server license is provided (provided the computer is owned by the UW). Client access licenses for these products are covered for the UW population.

To obtain software for these products, click here.

Microsoft EMS E3

The Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security E3 licensing SKU is included in our new contract with eligibility for employees and students. The following licensing plans are included:

Intune

Intune is a cloud-based device management tool. Only a single instance of Intune is allowed in our Entra ID tenant, so a shared service needs to be designed before UW customers might leverage this new capability.

Azure Information Protection P1

Azure Information Protection (sometimes called Azure Rights Management) provides the ability to protect files and other data objects by encrypting them. Some applications provide more protection capabilities via deeper integration. This license allows users to enable protection for a given file, provided they have the necessary client software. All access to a protected file is audited and the file owner can revoke access centrally. The ability to normally interact with a protected file is free, but only those granted access are able to do so. Protected files remain protected regardless of where they are moved or copied to.

This capability is available now; for more information please see our documentation.

Support

Departments with a demonstrated business requirement for the Premium Services noted above are requested to contact the UW-IT Technology Service Center at help@uw.edu to arrange applicable enterprise special orders no later than April 15, 2020, to be available by July 1, 2020.

Microsoft Campus Agreement 2018-2019

Summary

The UW’s Microsoft Campus Agreement has been renewed for the period of April 1, 2018 to May 31, 2019 with no significant changes from the previous year. Software already deployed and in use will continue to be activated (and re-activated) as before.

The Microsoft software provided by past agreements remains available under the new agreement, including the following:

Microsoft Windows Enterprise (upgrade)
Office 2013 and 2016 for Windows
Office 2011 and 2016 for Macintosh
Office 365 ProPlus
Visio 2013 and 2016 Professional
Project 2013 and 2016 Professional

Visual Studio

Visual Studio Pro, with Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), has been provided to individual UW staff under individual named subscriptions.
Beginning with renewals on June 1st, 2019, UW-IT will automatically renew Visual Studio subscriptions, charging the same budgets as the previous year. Please contact UW-IT at help@uw.edu if you do not want your subscription renewed.
The fee for Visual Studio Pro with MSDN, expiring 5/31/2020, is $60.
The fee for Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN, expiring 5/31/2020, is $335.
Use DreamSpark for computing labs and for students and faculty –- for instructional and non-commercial research purposes only.