Forum Discussion
EM+S E3 50 Seat Legacy donation - some customers being charged - why?
Thanks for replying DevLunsford.
I have an update, after raising it through Microsoft Non-profit support. The EM+S E3 donation retirement was notified in the Admin Message Centre on 11th October 2021, under MC289247 and with the title "We’re retiring the legacy Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security E3 grant". That is the only notification that I could find and basically it says that it will be retired from 4th April 2022.
In case you can't find it, here is the text of the message:
Because most of the nonprofits we currently support are small, beginning April 4, 2022, we’re retiring the legacy Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security E3 (EMS E3) grant, which was built primarily to secure large organizations.
Recommended actions
At your next renewal date:
- Move your users to the discounted EMS E3 nonprofit offer (75 percent off commercial pricing).
- Manually move up to 10 users to the Microsoft 365 Business Premium grant, which includes both world-class security and the innovative Office apps and intelligent cloud services.
I can only think that when I had seen this notification, I had wrongly assumed that in-action would have resulted in automatic cancelling of the granted subscription at first renewal after April 2022, not automatic switch to the discounted EM+S E3 offer.
As our subscriptions for the granted products are paid via invoice, when we cancelled the subscription, Microsoft issued a credit note for the full invoiced amount which was applied against the invoice, and so zeroed out.
From what I can see from our clients, the charge is occurring on renewal date and for us has been applied to clients with renewals from 1st July 2023.
Hope this helps others and a word of caution to ensure you migrate off the legacy E2 granted licences.
Thank youSPH_Colin and @Dev Lunsford
We were hit with the $1760.94 bill on our September billing. I've been going back and forth with Microsoft Support and he just kept on telling me that we were notified via email. I told him I've checked my email and looked through the Office 365 Message Center and I did not find anything. I did not think about looking back to October 2021.
Microsoft did a great job in notifying everyone of the final cancellation of E2 licenses and reduction of the Azure Grants but one notice 2 years ago and suddenly charging us $1760.94 is not good. I'm cancelling and getting a refund to repurchase the EMS3 at a monthly rate which easier for my non-profit.
While working with Tech Support, I requested a refund on the 50 licenses of EMS3 donation. The guy was helpful, he said he had to process it as several refunds. So we got $552 one day, $552 the second business day, $536 the third day, and finally the remaining on the fourth business day. At the beginning of November, I had to submit all my credit card receipts to finance. I looked at all my Microsoft receipts and discovered that they refunded me the amounts on my Microsoft Teams Domestic Calling Plan($1640), Audio Conferencing($1), Enterprise Mobility + Security E3($120.33), and an additional $1611.79 on my Enterprise Mobility + Security E3 50-seat Donation invoice after I canceled it. So now I need to open another support ticket to clear up this billing mess that they over refunded me. The refund of the EMS3 50-seat donation was automatic after I canceled.
Even with this mess, I still think Microsoft has a better solution for non-profits than Google Workspace.