Forum Discussion
New Service Plans in Office 365 for Education
Heads up - I just noticed some new service plans in our Office 365 for Education license skus.
In the Office 365 Pro Plus sku for faculty and students, we now have the service plan "Office Online for Education." In PowerShell when I look at the sku, the service plan appears to be called "Exchange_S_Foundation." Does anyone have any knowledge of the nature of this service plan?
Also, in the Office 365 for Education sku for faculty and students, we have two new service plans - "Power Apps for Office 365" and "Flow for Office 365." Both have a status of "Pending Activation." What does this mean exactly? Will these turn on automatically at some point, or will we have to opt in to those services?
- Mohamed Shehata
Microsoft
Hello,
EXCHANGE_S_FOUNDATION enables features profile picture customization which require Exchange service to work. It is found in SKUs that do not have EXO plans, like Office ProPlus or Project Essentials. You can ignore it. - I found this was being added when i added either the student or faculty license for PowerBI. Would still be good to understand why this is
Hi, I personally mean, that this is some kind of "core" Exchange Online service. It is contained with plans which offer some e-mail functionality to other online services. Like Stream and Project Online. See SKU and Service Plan ID.
Just as a follow-up, our Exchange_S_Foundation service plan changed from PendingActivation status to Success status, and it won't disable via PowerShell. It doesn't appear in the admin panel so I can't disable it there either. It seems that this is intended to be on for everyone, but there is not description of what it enables which is a concern.
This also hosed my automated licensing scripts since it sees everyone as out of spec with their license template. I have a ticket in with Office 365 support now so hopefully they can shed some light on this.
Office 365 support has confirmed that the Exchange_S_Foundation service plan cannot be disabled, and also that it does not add any features or capabilities. It appears to be something of a placeholder. I think this is a bad idea and have posted this feedback in the hopes that this won't happen again in the future:
Please vote it up if you agree. Thanks!
- No idea for the Exchange_S_Foundation service plan, but for PowerApps and Flow the answer is Yes: EDU plans are eligible for having PowerApps and Flow and I thik Microsoft is currently "ataching" both services to Office 365 subscriptions
