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
- Everyone seems in agreement that an opt out feature would help.
I think that Microsoft are actually helping us out here. I look at multiple tenants for organisations every day. Most employees that want to try a service spin up a new tenant on a card and the organisation see nothing. Here you can see it as the admin and if you want to pull that into your volume licensing in the future. It could be useful.
paulbytes wrote:
Everyone seems in agreement that an opt out feature would help.
I think that Microsoft are actually helping us out here. I look at multiple tenants for organisations every day. Most employees that want to try a service spin up a new tenant on a card and the organisation see nothing. Here you can see it as the admin and if you want to pull that into your volume licensing in the future. It could be useful.paulbytes Don't be fooled by Microsoft. They are only helping themselves out and hide it behind a facade of good will. It's not configurable because its potential to generate money with this is higher if businesses cannot deactivate this.
Some commentary on this topic: https://office365itpros.com/2019/10/28/blocking-power-platform-self-service-purchases/
- This is an unacceptable practice
(And potentially a dangerous precedent)
Whilst some organisations may well see this as a positive move and indeed they have the right to welcome it
It should in every case be for the individual tenant to have the option to allow or disallow purchase decisions being made at the user level
The simple way to deal fairly with the interests of all stakeholders here is to provide an opt-in (or opt-out) button
At the tenant level
If Microsoft do wish to persist with this
Then at the very least they should include
In bold print a clear warning to individuals
At the point of purchase That they may be contravening company policy in making a purchase leading to Potential personal financial loss and/or disciplinary action (perhaps including dismissal)
Maybe they could include a configurable text box for the tenant to have the option to personalise the statement to convey the company’s policy? This is an underhanded money grab by Microsoft to allow uneducated users to bypass corporate spending controls and go the Shadow IT route. Microsoft knows this will happen and is taking advantage of those employees who don't know better. Reconciling this nightmare after the fact and enforcing through policy not controls is idiotic and potentially a deal breaker. As with the other here you should head over and vote for the addition of a binary control to turn on or off this "feature".
This is unflippin believable. I am usually on board with virtually anything Microsoft has been doing as of late. But I agree with many others on this forum that this will create chaos and more Shadow IT of which i need neither of. Please Microsoft, add a toggle to allow or disallow this at a tenant level. Admins should NEVER be forced into a setting that could allow users to purchase things on their own.
@ agree with everyone else. I can't believe they're rolling this out without the ability for admins to disable it. We centrally control licenses and assign then to people who need them, not want them. We don't want people to sign up and buy their own. They'll attempt to expense them to the company (we won't pay), and it may give them access to features we've specifically decided they shouldn't have. This is a terrible "feature".
Please vote (give 3 votes plz) and forward :
https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-admin/suggestions/38878723-ability-to-block-self-service-purchase-capabilitie
Kelly_Edinger My view on the matter: https://www.petri.com/office-365-users-have-credit-cards-ready
It's a bad idea. Perhaps it would be acceptable if Microsoft includes a switch to disable the feature for a tenant, but rolling something out without giving tenants any control over how their users interact with a third-party (Microsoft in this case) is simply unacceptable.
Kelly_Edinger Microsoft Azure Active Directory admins within the customer organisation will have visibility into self-service purchases through the Microsoft 365 admin centre. Later, if the procurement department for the organisation wants to consolidate the subscription into its central agreement, the admin can assign the users replacement licenses procured through the central agreement (EA, MPSA, Microsoft Customer Agreement via CSP, MOSA, etc.) and ask the end user to cancel their original subscription.
Admins can’t turn off this capability. It's recommend customers use internal company guidelines and documentation to ensure employees know what is and is not acceptable for use within their organisations.
I'm not sure that this is the best way forward personally from MS, but I can see what they are trying to do, cut down on the admin for users who are trying products out. I'd expect that this would be rolled out to more product sets in the future so maybe we need to look at policy to prevent unwanted spend rather than rely on the technical prevention.
I hope that helps.
- See also this blog post from Veronique Palmer
https://veroniquepalmer.com/2019/10/23/in-one-month-users-will-be-able-to-buy-their-own-powerbi-powerapps-and-flow-licenses-in-your-company-and-you-cant-stop-them-microsoft365-governancenightmare/
She even created a uservoice entry. Please vote there:
https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-admin/suggestions/38878723-ability-to-block-self-service-purchase-capabilitie Thank you for sharing this as I had missed the announcement in the Admin center. This is indeed a terrible idea.
- Really bad communication of this change as there are so many unanswered questions - what happens if the user leaves, what happens for orgs that mandate central PO control, what about software asset management?
