Questions about licensing and availability of Office 365 functionality

[Paul Le Sueur]

Dear All,

I am working on a SharePoint in Office 365 solution and I have need of using “cross site publishing” features in SharePoint. Unfortunately I only have E1 subscriptions available to me at present and from my experimentation, and from this article (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint-online-service-description.aspx - search for “WCM: Cross-Site Publishing” under the “Feature availability across Office 365 plans” section) it is clear that it is not currently possible to set up cross site publishing with the E1 plan.

My questions are:

1)      If I were to purchase 1 or more E3 subscriptions against the same tenancy, would the “WCM: Cross-Site Publishing” functionality be available?

2)      Would the “WCM: Cross-Site Publishing” functionality work for all users (E3 and E1)?

3)      Would having all E1 users using that feature be breaking any terms or licensing agreements?

I hope this makes sense, please feel free to ask if you have any questions!

Thank you, Paul.

[#2]

I have a vague memory of a discussion about this, probably it the old yammer network (:.

I think that MS stated that the people Authoring/Publishing the content would need and E3, but the people consuming the results would not. 

Hopefull someone from MS can confirm. @Dan Holme

[#3]

Thank you Dean, that would make sense.

It would be good if somebody from Microsoft can confirm! (thanks in advance :) )

[#4]

@Mark Kashman will know for sure (or can find out).

The "highlighted contents web part" may be worth looking at as a modern alternative in your approach.  That, for sure, is E1.

[#5]

Thank you Dan,

I will certainly try and get my head around the highlighted contents web part; that looks promising!

[#6]

@Dan Holmethanks for responding. I'm not always sure who to @mention for topics like this. It would be great if there was a Responsibilities list somewhere so that we could target the right people and not overwhelm the wrong ones. 

[#7 · Accepted solution]

It requires both creator and consumer to have E3, to have use rights when using/consuming the enterprise WCM search components - typically built into a custom portal (using the Content by Search web part). And as Dan suggested, maybe the same outcome can be achieved using the new Highlighted Content web part, that is by default scoped for a single site collection. More here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-the-Highlighted-content-web-part-E34199B0-FF1A-47FB-8F4...

Thx, Mark.

[#8]

Thank you very much everybody!