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.
- 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 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.
- Matthew Kotler
Microsoft
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.
Matthew Kotler While it's nice when Microsoft takes user feedback seriously and withdraws from a position that embarrassed the company, it would be so much better if some folks in Redmond asked people in the field before making assumptions that Office 365 tenants would like this sort of thing.
Thank you, Microsoft!
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.
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!
Please vote (give 3 votes plz) and forward :
- 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 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.
Kelly_Edinger It's very concerning that Microsoft is not providing a way to disable this feature should agency/company policies mandate centralized management of all licensing and purchases/expenditures in general.
To add to this mess, I read the Self-Service Purchase FAQ and found these lovely nuggets (red-highlight mine):
What happens to a self-service purchase if a user leaves the organization?
Valid users will continue to have full use of the self-service purchase for the duration of the subscription. The subscription remains active until the purchaser directly cancels it or an admin requests that the subscription be cancelled through customer support. Admins may also choose to assign a centrally purchased license to users of the cancelled subscription.
Are customers’ IT departments or partners expected to support products bought through self-service purchase?
IT departments and partners aren’t expected to provide support for products bought through self-service purchase. Microsoft will provide standard support for self-service purchasers.
So now Microsoft is not only going to encourage rogue purchases but officially sanctioning shadow IT? And dealing with customer support to manually cancel subscriptions?
Of all the half-baked ideas...
GLISIT wrote:What happens to a self-service purchase if a user leaves the organization?
Valid users will continue to have full use of the self-service purchase for the duration of the subscription. The subscription remains active until the purchaser directly cancels it or an admin requests that the subscription be cancelled through customer support. Admins may also choose to assign a centrally purchased license to users of the cancelled subscription.
No thanks, I rather keep paying the subscriptions fees than go through customer support again. 😂
DanielNiccoli In this regard, it is sad but true that dealing with Microsoft support is more of a waste of time (and therefore money) than paying for the subscription until it expires. Of course, there's always the option to cancel the credit card, LOL.
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.
