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The announcement regarding self-service purchase capabilities for Power Platform products??

Bronze Contributor

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   @Chris Webb adding you both to this as you always provide great insights. Thanks in advance!

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.

@Kelly_EdingerIt's an outrageous plan. I raised a ticket from the tenant to say so. I hope they at least take note.

I have posted a feedback in message center and received this bs reply:
Thank you for your feedback. We have put together a document capturing frequently asked questions from the community, which is available at https://aka.ms/selfservicefaq. We have read through your comment and will continue to evolve the document based on the questions and feedback we receive.
Yeah, I just entered the dislike in the O365 message center and voted for the option to disable this feature. This is what I wrote in the message center down vote:

You can't let anyone purchase software for the business just because they THINK they need it. That is ridiculous! Like new hires know what they need? OR that they should not be playing with reports in BI if their job is to go to the field and do data collection... We also have very specific purchase procedures to ensure we bill things properly to our clients- allowing the Wild West without the ability to turn off the feature is irresponsible. And this isn't just about a blatant money grab attempt, but we try to keep employees focused on their duties so they can advance- and this creates non-billable distractions. It would be like if you allow your MS Office developers to install XBox and xbox games- as much as they want- onto any of their own company computers - as much as they see fit. You would think that is an awful idea, just like this one.

I hope after reading all the comments from admins around the world that you understand things like this makes us second guess the trust we have placed with Microsoft and O365.

It would be nice if the FAQ was coherent or informative. It fails on both counts.  

@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...

 

 

 

 

 

@Kelly_Edinger  I am in agreement with you. This announcement came as a complete shock. Coupled with not having the ability to disable this feature does not sit well with me or my organization. 

 

While I understand that Microsoft is wanting to push the Power Platform but some organizations are not ready for that level of technicality and they will need to slide into using it. Power BI is enough and dealing with sprawl is awful. We have to have time to put governance in place before we release anything to the organization.

 

I did put in a dislike on the Message Center announcement and explained my choice. I also voted on the User Voice to add in the disable feature. I hope there is a ton of backlash on this announcement because they have a lot to explain during Ignite next week about this decision.

 


@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. :face_with_tears_of_joy:

@Daniel Niccoli 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.

 

 

 

I agree with the sentiment of the others.  Our jaws dropped.  Its a bad idea on so many levels, driving shadow IT and creating challenges for customer IT support teams, as well as generating hidden costs and risks to future deployments/changes.  

@Kristin_L_365I don't know if anyone saw it but Microsoft just announced that our end users can license Microsoft Teams to function with the enterprise on their own and do not have to wait to be upgraded.

 

MC194285: Updated Feature: Microsoft Teams self-service access for users in partially synced tenants.

 

This is a disturbing trend by Microsoft.

If you do not want un-synced users to create accounts in your Azure AD tenant, you can turn this feature off by setting AllowEmailVerifiedUsers to False in your tenant.

@Shaun Jennings  Fantastic, let all the horrific announcements come out at once, just in time for Halloween... Ugh.

@paulbytes 


@paulbytes wrote:
If you do not want un-synced users to create accounts in your Azure AD tenant, you can turn this feature off by setting AllowEmailVerifiedUsers to False in your tenant.

So, they will let us turn off this feature but let the Power Pack go unfettered....

@Shaun Jennings I’m not saying that its the right thing to do from MS but at least it can be managed. Unfair really for us to say that this is the start of something more than the Power platform issue.

@paulbytes you sound like you work for Microsoft. Stop. If you are an admin and/or run any kind of IT enterprise, you would agree with everyone else on here. The fact that you, not necessarily disagree, but keep doing the whole "glass half full/empower the users" approach suggests you either encourage Shadow IT in your environment or just like having an environment run by imbeciles. This is hands down an absolutely terrible idea and the idiots responsible don't have a clue on how to run an IT enterprise. The people responsible for this idea have issues with admins and want to empower everyone else in their stead because they always hated having to "put in a ticket". Hopefully this never makes it to the finish line. #worstideaever

To be fair to Microsoft:

 

1. Their business is selling software.

2. Their view of the situation is colored by 1). It;'s also highly influenced by their view of the world from Redmond, WA, and how software is managed internally within Microsoft.

3. Few of the people who are loudest advocates for "user empowerment" away from the "cold, dead hand of IT" who wish to "impose control" have ever been responsible for large-scale IT environments.

4. Those of us who have run such environments know how easy it is for users to screw things up; they want to do the right thing but don't often make good decisions. This is why we have so many complicated Excel worksheets driving business processes.

Yeah, and who will users turn to after all the mess their create with Power/Flow starts to tumble or money run out from that credit card :) IT.. "hey, it showed me the Buy button, so i pressed it and did this and that and now all my data is somewhere and nothing works, fix this!".