Oct 24, 2019
In this episode, I announce some changes going on at CRM Audio
and share my thoughts on self-service license purchase options for
the Power Platform. This episode is brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic.
Microsoft recently posted a notification in the Microsoft 365
Message Center this week notifying customers that starting in
mid-November, end users would be able to start purchasing licenses
directly without Administrator approval.
This has resulted in the typical doomsday reaction by some
people in the community. It seems like whenever Microsoft announces
some change to the way that software is sold or licensed, somebody
will be outraged. This speaks to the breath of Microsoft’s customer
bases, and you can’t always make everybody happy.
Predictions are made that CIO’s won’t trust the platform and
won’t use it. Yet, based on Microsoft’s latest financial numbers,
they are doing something right and the sky is not falling.
I think that, like usual, this outrage is overblown, some
arising from misunderstanding what is happening, and some from
people who work for very large enterprises not recognizing that the
majority of companies' environments are not like theirs.
The Power Platform is just that—a platform. Saying that end
users can buy their own licenses does not mean that they can buy
access to data—it means that they can buy licenses—using their own
money—to build their own apps, flows, and reports. It doesn’t give
them the ability to bypass any corporate data governance.
So here is why I think that self-service license options are
nothing to fear:
- Users can do it anyway. Even before the self-service option is
introduced, if an employee or department wants to build PowerApps
or use Power BI, they can buy their own licenses outside of your
tenant. With the self-service option, at least you get visibility
for who is using Power Platform and your data and access policies
still apply. Also, many Office 365 services and add-ons can be
purchased and used without admin approval today, so what is the
difference?
- Users can do it with most competing systems. Slack, Salesforce,
and Lucidchart grew to what they are today by selling their
services directly to individuals and departments without corporate
approval. In many companies, these grew to be corporate standards
based on the number of people in the organization that were using
them. Saying that CIO’s will not use Power Platform because they
offer self-service license purchases is a fallacy because what
alternative are they going to use that doesn’t also allow
self-service license purchases without administrator approval? Why
should Microsoft be held to a different standard than equivalent
services?
- You still maintain control—DLP rules determine what connectors
can be used in end-users’ apps and flows, security roles in
SharePoint and CDS grant or block what records they can access and
actions they can perform in corporate systems, and Active Directory
SSO limits where users can log in to Power Platform apps and
services. Plus you have full visibility for who have purchased
licenses and what they are doing with them. And most importantly,
just because an end-user buys a license, that doesn’t give them
access to your precious corporate data. How is someone buying a
license and building an app with their own data any different than
someone doing the same thing with an Excel spreadsheet? If your
organization has a policy against people buying their own licenses
to build apps, you can see who is doing this and go knock them in
the head or cut off their access to the other services.
Based on these reasons, I feel this is nothing to worry about.
Would it have been better to give the option to disable
self-service license purchases? Maybe. Will some admin somewhere
not know about this and have users build ninja IT? Likely. Is it
reasonable to say Microsoft shouldn’t do this when it would put
them at a competitive disadvantage in many situations? Absolutely
not.