Forum Discussion
The announcement regarding self-service purchase capabilities for Power Platform products??
Just found this in the message center: " Self-service purchase capabilities for Power Platform products will be available for commercial cloud customers starting 11/19. Today, individuals within your organization are unable to purchase subscriptions or assign licenses for themselves or their departments without contacting you, their admin. Based on customer demand, we’ll soon be enabling self-service purchase and license management capabilities, which will allow users within your organization to purchase products directly, starting with the Power Platform family of products: Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow."
Does anyone have more info on this? Does this mean that end users willing to pay for a license will be able to connect company data to other sources and bypass their admins altogether? I'm finding this to be a bit insane - would love to hear other feedback. adam deltinger ChrisWebbTech adding you both to this as you always provide great insights. Thanks in advance!
At Microsoft, we’ve been listening to all of the feedback regarding the rollout of our self-service purchase capabilities for Power Platform products. To those of you who provided your input, thank you! Based on your feedback, we’ve adjusted our approach to better address the needs of both IT admins and end users within organizations. We’re making the following changes to our plan:
- On November 19th, we will provide IT admins a way to turn off self-service purchasing on a per product basis via PowerShell.
- To provide more time to prepare for this change, we are updating the launch for self-service purchase capabilities for Power Platform products to start with Power BI on January 14th for all commercial cloud customers.
You can find more details about self-service purchase at the Self-service purchase FAQ. Thank you again for taking the time to provide your feedback. We look forward to a continued partnership to help empower all organizations to achieve more.
64 Replies
Not giving tenant admins control over this is wrong Microsoft!
This will definitely create chaos. It's not about limiting the users to be productive but we need to have this under control. At least an admin setting to enable or disable this feature.
I agree with the others that this is a shock. I also am a huge proponent of new functionality of MS365, but one of my biggest headaches today is the sprawl of individual users and managers buying their own software!
We have an internal policy for centralized contracts and license purchases, however some users still go out and buy things on their own. A recent audit of Adobe found 35 users paying full retail price for subscriptions using their company credit card, while we buy it under our enterprise contract at a significant discount. For our org, all of these random credit card purchases ultimately get billed to my IT budgets, yet I have no control over them and cannot cancel them until the existing annual subscription expires. This announcement now seems like Microsoft is going to be the next cloud I have to continually chase, especially since we are currently giving PowerBI to select power user groups.
At the very least, an opt-in or opt-out toggle for the tenant would allow us to maintain our policy standards!
Kelly_Edinger I was coming in to post this exact thing. I'm trying to keep an open mind, but it's extremely concerning. The Power team is going a bit too far in their scoping of services - I know this year is the year of upsell (read the slides from the Inspire conference) to try to get customers to upgrade to E5, or more fully embrace the PowerApps, but companies are cautious and need to know how this will affect their data security.
How will billing work? Already I have to keep checking if someone has created a DevOps Organization tied to our AD, and warn them that when the month is up, they will lose their work since we will not pay for anything outside our enterprise agreement - it won't be approved in billing. So now I've got another place to watch?
I'm all for removing silos of information, being able to easily integrate new tech - I love Office365/Azure/Power applications, but this seems like it will create silos in some companies - especially the ones with strict enforcement policies. Not all 'strict' companies are GCC/Edu tenants.
'Lots of customer demand' - convince me of the scenarios.
- And..."starting with the Power Platform family of products". What else is to come?
Monitoring billing isn't enough if this is to be non-configurable. We need more tools as admins. - This was a major shock to me and my team. This is asking for Shadow IT. Not to mention data sprawl and data protection issues. Can we get some more info from MS?
Kelly_Edinger I was taken by surprise myself, as there has been no communication on this as a post here, on blogs, or anywhere else!
Further down, the message centre post says (emphasis mine):
The self-service purchase capability arrives automatically and is not configurable, so there’s no action you need to take.
Being "not configurable" is bizarre. What if our company purchasing is centralised and no one gets to purchase anything without a formal process?
Abhimanyu Singh : Hopefully not-configurable means only the function in the Admin service. Not the self-service pruchase function at all.
