Questions on RDS license

[Newlife]

Hi Community,

One of our customer raised the below query regarding RDS usage rights of Office 365 desktop applications when using the Office 365 Nonprofit E3 plan.

They’re aware that the Office 365 Enterprise E3 plan allows for Office 365 desktop applications to be installed and run from a Remote Desktop Services machine and have previously proposed this for customer environments that require an RDS or Citrix hosted desktop environment.

However –  the customer is a registered charity and can therefore take advantage of the lower pricing available as part of the Office 365 Nonprofit E3 (They believe they’re currently utilizing a Business Premium plan – presumably the Office 365 Nonprofit Business Premium Plan).

Our query is – does the Office 365 Nonprofit E3 plan include usage rights on a Remote Desktop Services machine similar to the Office 365 Enterprise E3 plan?

When they checked the service description for ‘Desktop virtualization’ (which they believe is the required feature that allows for RDS usage rights) they couldn’t see the Office 365 Nonprofit E3 plan listed amongst the plans.

They noticed there are some subtle differences between the Office 365 Nonproft E3 and Enterprise E3 plans (such as different mailbox sizes as well as Yammer and Stream not listed as available services in the Nonprofit E3 plan), therefore they didn’t want to assume the Nonprofit E3 plan included RDS usage rights.

Any pointers would be of great help.

Many thanks in advance.

[#2]

Regular E3 does not include RDS rights either. You still need to have RDS licenses for clients to access RDS. You still get a non-profit discount on these RDS licenses.

Never mind, I was thinking RDS access itself. Not sure on the use rights of office being installed. I would assume they should match, but I'm curious myself if anyone else knows for sure.

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Newlife @Chris Webb

Yes, it does. See here

https://products.office.com/en-gb/nonprofit/office-365-nonprofit-plans-and-pricing?tab=2

See E3, scroll down to where it says: 

• Enterprise management of apps with Group Policy, Telemetry, Shared Computer

Shared Computer as in support for shared computer activation (RDS)

See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/deploy-office-365-proplus-by-using-remote-desktop-serv...

In the article above it also confirms - any supported version of Office 365 ProPlus, which includes the non-profit SKU. 

Hope that helps!

Best, Chris