Microsoft Product Terms Update: October 2026

Microsoft's Product Terms changes effective on 1 October 2026 introduce Azure capacity reservations that can become chargeable before you use the capacity, add an Essentials edition of Azure IoT Operations, and add Microsoft 365 A7 and Microsoft 365 G7 to the suite listings. There are also changes beneath the product announcements. The Viva prerequisite table loses Office 365 E1 and gains an unexplained Office 365 E7 entry, while selected Project Plan 5 rights disappear from provisions that still retain other Plan 5 entitlements. This update includes the 15 September 2026 release, which introduced Microsoft IQ terms and a definition determining which customer-built artificial intelligence (AI) applications qualify for third-party use. Microsoft revised the IQ patent wording again on 1 October.

Key takeaways:

• Microsoft IQ's new conditions restrict application programming interface (API) use, data redistribution and third-party access. A customer application needs additional functionality beyond a prompt interface to qualify as a Microsoft AI Customer Solution.

• Azure Future Capacity Reservations charge for committed capacity once Microsoft makes it available, whether you use it or not. The 1 October terms provide no guaranteed delivery date, pricing discount or dedicated hardware.

• Project Online retired on 30 September 2026. The 1 October terms remove selected Plan 5 and Project Essentials references, while retaining a deployment provision for Plan 3/5. Microsoft's guidance also preserves access to Planner's premium capabilities for those subscribers.

• Microsoft 365 A7 and G7 appear in the Product Terms from 1 October 2026. A7's Student Use Benefit supplies Office 365 A5 Student Use Benefit, Enterprise Mobility + Security A5 Student Use Benefit, Windows Education A3 Student Use Benefit and Minecraft: Education Edition, rather than the complete A7 suite.

• Azure IoT Operations Essentials has single-node, user and processing limits, and expressly prohibits the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) connector. The previous Azure IoT Operations entry is renamed Standard.

Microsoft IQ sets conditions for applications using Microsoft data and AI

If your organisation is building an AI application that uses Microsoft 365 information, the new Microsoft IQ terms govern how that application may access data and serve other users. Microsoft introduced the section on 15 September. Its scope includes Work IQ API, which gives software access to workplace information, and Azure AI Search's Web Knowledge Source, which retrieves information from the public web.

Work IQ API allows applications and agents to work with information such as email, meetings, Teams messages and documents, while preserving the underlying permissions and governance controls. An application programming interface, or API, is the connection through which one piece of software requests information or actions from another. Microsoft's licensing guidance confirms that Work IQ API usage is billed through Copilot Credits. The new Product Terms designate it a First-Party Consumption Service, Microsoft's category for online services available as Azure meters.

Moving data and licensing access

The new conditions prohibit using the APIs to migrate data from a Microsoft Product Offering to a non-Microsoft product or service. There is an express exception preserving your ability to authorise the migration or export of your data through Microsoft-supported capabilities. If you are moving information between systems, you need to distinguish the API use covered by the restriction from the supported export routes preserved by the exception.

For Work IQ specifically, neither the customer nor people accessing the API through that customer may use it, or information accessed through it, to redistribute, resell or sublicense data obtained through the APIs. The supported migration and export exception appears here too. Access through an application also cannot be used to avoid the licences required for the Microsoft Product Offering being accessed. Paying for API consumption leaves those underlying licence requirements in place.

Testing the application and explaining its licence requirements

Before using the APIs for performance testing, you need Microsoft's express written permission. The same provision prohibits using the APIs to identify, exploit or publicly disclose potential security vulnerabilities.

The application's licence information and query identifiers are subject to separate restrictions. You cannot misrepresent users' need for a valid licence, whether through an explicit statement, an omission or an implication. Nor may an application obscure or alter a unique referral identifier or the source of its queries to hide a breach of the agreement.

Which terms apply and how IQ is classified

The IQ conditions supplement the Universal License Terms for Online Services and Microsoft's API Terms of Use. Where the API terms conflict with the Product Terms, the Product Terms take precedence.

For purchasing purposes, the product conditions place Microsoft IQ in the Server product pool, the licensing category used for discount groupings. As at 1 October 2026, the table lists no promotions or Frontline Worker Licences. A Frontline Worker Licence is a product licence designated F, FLW or Frontline, with specific rules governing which users may receive it. The IQ table identifies no such licence option for a buyer to select; it does not establish a separate frontline offer for IQ.

A prompt interface alone does not qualify your application

The permission to let third parties use a customer-built application depends on the new Microsoft AI Customer Solution definition. Your application must combine your own software with a Microsoft AI Service, add primary and significant functionality, and avoid being primarily a substitute for that service. Microsoft AI Service includes online services or features using AI, including generative AI.

Microsoft's definition expressly excludes applications whose only contribution is billing, licence management, a prompt interface or infrastructure services. The prompt-interface examples cover chat, agentic and multimodal interfaces, and workflows. The infrastructure examples include virtual machines, containers, storage and their management. Giving users a different screen through which to send prompts is therefore insufficient on its own to satisfy the definition. The wording in force on 1 October 2026 leaves room for applications that add the required functionality, but supplies no numerical test for how much is enough.

Under the IQ provision, third-party use is permitted solely in connection with the qualifying solution. Your organisation is responsible for ensuring that everyone who accesses or distributes it complies with the licensing agreement and applicable laws, and obtains any necessary related licences. The responsibility extends to the people using or distributing your application; it is not satisfied merely by licensing the organisation that built it.

The patent exclusion changes again in October

The 15 September IQ wording, available through the page's Effective Date selection, excluded Microsoft's liability for patent claims arising from a Microsoft AI Customer Solution. On 1 October, Microsoft replaced that sentence with an exclusion of both its defence obligation and its liability for patent infringement claims arising from the implementation of Standards in a Customer Solution.

There are two separate changes. The 1 October exclusion identifies a particular source of patent claims, the implementation of technical standards, rather than referring to patent claims arising from the solution generally. It also switches to the separately defined Customer Solution. That existing definition concerns a customer application combined with Microsoft Azure Services, whereas the new Microsoft AI Customer Solution definition concerns a Microsoft AI Service. The October sentence changes both the type of claim and the defined application to which it refers.

To establish which patent claims Microsoft would defend, an organisation needs the defence provisions and exclusions in its applicable agreement. Deleting the previous sentence does not, by itself, promise protection against every claim outside the replacement exclusion. Microsoft's 1 October change notice records an update to the solution language without explaining why it switches between the two defined terms.

Web Knowledge Source has its own data conditions

Azure AI Search's Web Knowledge Source supplies current public-web information to an AI application's retrieval process. The new IQ provision identifies its use of Grounding with Bing Search and/or Grounding with Bing Custom Search, classifies it as a First-Party Consumption Service, and applies Microsoft's enterprise Bing grounding terms.

Microsoft's technical guidance, checked on 1 October 2026, makes the data boundary explicit. The Data Protection Addendum does not apply to data sent to Web Knowledge Source, and customer data flows outside Azure's compliance and geographical boundary. Usage also incurs costs. If your application combines internal information with public-web retrieval, those conditions belong in the assessment of that web-retrieval component; treating every part of the application as an ordinary Azure data-processing service would overlook them.

Azure Future Capacity Reservations can cost money before deployment

Azure's capacity shortages have persisted for years, with artificial intelligence (AI) adding to the pressure. In its July 2024 earnings call, Microsoft was already describing several quarters of constrained AI capacity and the need to use other providers to help meet demand. For your organisation, the shortage can surface when you try to deploy another virtual machine, the software-based computer on which an application runs. Having enough Azure quota does not guarantee that deployment will succeed. Quota gives an organisation's subscription permission to deploy resources; the necessary hardware must also be available in the chosen location.

The difficulties continued into 2026. Computer Weekly reported shortages in UK South in April, particularly for virtual machines using AMD processors, high-performance computing (HPC) configurations and graphics processing units (GPUs). The Register also reported UK customers being refused additional capacity. Across the Atlantic, the problem had already disrupted East US deployments in July and August 2025. The Register described failures when customers tried to create or update virtual machines, with some still reporting difficulties after Microsoft said it had mitigated the incident.

Microsoft's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, acknowledged the shortage in the 29 October 2025 earnings call: “We’ve worked very hard to try to mitigate it as best we can, but we have been short in Azure”. She said Azure revenue could have been higher with more capacity available to it.

The admission followed an earlier warning. In the 30 April 2025 earnings call, Hood explained that Microsoft had hoped to bring supply and demand into balance by the end of its fourth fiscal quarter, but demand had increased. “We are going to be a little short, still, a little tight as we exit the year”, she said, referring to Microsoft's fiscal year ending in June 2025.

Buying more chips cannot solve every constraint. In his 31 October 2025 BG2 interview, Satya Nadella described chips sitting in inventory because Microsoft could not build facilities with power quickly enough to connect them. Bloomberg reported in September 2026 that shortages had forced Microsoft to turn away some cloud and AI business. Citing people familiar with its plans, Bloomberg put Microsoft's planned expansion at about 12 gigawatts of data-centre capacity to more than 38 gigawatts by 2032. However, DER AKTIONÄR reported that Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw subsequently said the planning figures were incorrect. The reported gigawatt figures describe the facilities' electrical capacity, rather than computing resources immediately available to Azure customers.

Customers also compete with Microsoft's own services for the capacity it has. In the same October 2025 earnings call, Hood described allocating resources first to services including Microsoft 365 Copilot, its AI assistant for work, as well as giving priority to Microsoft's research and product engineering teams. She explicitly acknowledged the impact on Azure. If the hardware you need is already unavailable, even an on-demand capacity reservation cannot secure it. Azure rejects the reservation request when it cannot supply the requested capacity.

Against that background, Azure Future Capacity Reservations give Microsoft a way to plan demand before customers need the hardware. An organisation requests capacity for particular Azure resources in a specified region, with a start date and reservation term, committing to pay for the capacity Microsoft makes available even if you leave it unused. Microsoft can accept the request, decline it or propose changes, and undertakes to make reasonable efforts to respond within seven calendar days of receiving a complete request. The October change notice describes the release as “Private GA”, rather than announcing unrestricted availability. Neither that notice nor the reservation terms provides a complete list of eligible regions and virtual-machine types or explains how a customer joins. The approval requirement remains; the notice does not establish unrestricted ordering for every Azure resource.

The new arrangement sits alongside two different ways to reserve capacity. On-demand reservations secure available hardware immediately, with charges starting when the reservation is created. Azure Capacity Blocks cover scheduled periods with a start date up to 56 days ahead in Microsoft's scheduling documentation. That documentation allows a Future reservation's start date to be between seven days and six months ahead. It also defines a minimum commitment, measured in days after the start date, before a committed reservation can be updated or deleted. The application programming interface (API) example, which shows how software submits a request, uses 30 days. That is an example value; the page does not establish a universal 30-day minimum.

Your contractual flexibility is more limited than an adjustable date in the software might suggest. Although the scheduling documentation exposes a cutoff for updates or deletion, the October Product Terms prohibit modifying an accepted reservation during the 12 weeks before its agreed start date. The restriction also applies during the fulfilment period, when Microsoft has up to 30 days after the start date to make the remaining accepted capacity available. An API field or sample does not override that contractual restriction.

Acceptance also stops short of an unconditional delivery guarantee. Microsoft commits to reasonable efforts to provide the capacity on the agreed date and can supply it in portions during that 30-day window. You can cancel any portion still unfulfilled at the end without further charges for it. Additional cancellation rights for a material shortfall depend on Microsoft's applicable policy, which the clause does not set out. It grants no general right to cancel the entire reservation if a missing portion prevents your deployment from working. The terms also provide no monetary service credits for failure to make accepted capacity available beyond the remedies they expressly describe.

Two of Microsoft's commitments here are reasonable-efforts ones: to respond within seven calendar days of receiving a complete request, and to make the accepted capacity available on the agreed start date. The customer is charged for the full committed quantity made available, with no refund or credit for unused capacity.

The financial commitment begins with delivery. Under the Future Capacity Reservation payment terms, charges start when Microsoft makes capacity available, separately for each portion if it arrives in stages. The organisation then pays for the full committed quantity made available throughout the reservation term, even if you leave some of it unused. There is no refund or credit for that unused capacity. The reservation provides neither a price discount nor dedicated hardware, and Azure prepayment cannot normally be used to pay for it. Those terms do not explain how the reservation payment interacts with charges for the virtual machines you deploy or with existing discount arrangements. There is no charge for capacity Microsoft has not made available. Your organisation must still meet the subscription, quota, deployment and configuration requirements. When the reservation expires, its charges stop and continued Azure use attracts the consumption rates applicable at that time.

In our view, the offer is a response to the shortage: a mechanism for planning and rationing scarce capacity. Microsoft gains a dated demand signal backed by a commercial commitment. You gain an accepted request for future capacity, subject to those delivery conditions, rather than leaving allocation entirely to the day you need to migrate systems, increase their size or switch away from a failed system. The cost of that greater advance commitment is paying for capacity once Microsoft supplies it, whether the organisation is ready to use it or not.

Two smaller Azure wording changes accompany the new provisions. The disconnected-container proof-of-concept price now uses the hyphenated adjective “one-month”, and the Capacity Blocks purchase paragraph corrects “a Azure” to “an Azure”. The underlying period and Capacity Blocks conditions remain unchanged.

Project loses selected Plan 5 provisions but retains deployment rights

Project Online retired on 30 September 2026. Microsoft's retirement guidance, checked on 1 October, says the closure does not affect Project desktop, Project Server Subscription Edition or Planner. It also confirms access to Planner's premium capabilities for organisations holding Planner and Project Plan 3 or Plan 5 licences. The current Plan 3 offer includes Project desktop, and the retained deployment provision discussed below still names both Plan 3 and Plan 5. Losing Project Online does not remove everything those subscriptions provide.

If you already own Project software and are considering a subscription add-on, the October Cloud Add-on table now offers fewer routes. Project Professional, Project Standard and a Project Server Client Access Licence (CAL) all remain qualifying licences for Planner and Project Plan 3 Add-on. Each has lost its corresponding Plan 5 Add-on entry. The Project Server CAL route also loses Project Essentials Add-on. The changes concern what you can add to those existing licences; they need to be read alongside the rights that remain for subscription users.

Microsoft has also removed Plan 5 from the installation and use paragraph and from the paragraph granting limited SharePoint Online access in support of Project. Both now name Plan 3 alone. The Universal Resource Scheduling provision makes a similar change, replacing Plan 3/5 with Plan 3 while retaining Planner Plan 1. That scheduling permission remains confined to Project and Task tables within a project.

Yet the separate Deployment Rights for Project provision still names Plan 3/5. If you hold one of those subscriptions, that provision lets you install and use Project Standard or Professional 2016 or earlier on a device licensed for and running Office Standard or Professional Plus. It also recognises devices licensed for Office Professional Plus through a Microsoft 365 From Software Assurance (From SA) user entitlement. The remaining wording is important for organisations keeping those older desktop installations: Microsoft has removed Plan 5 selectively, rather than deleting it from every grant of rights.

From SA refers to From Software Assurance subscriptions, a route for customers moving from on-premises software covered by Software Assurance, or SA, to cloud subscriptions. Microsoft closed new and additional Microsoft 365 From SA orders in February 2024 while preserving renewal of existing licences. Under the retained Microsoft 365 E3/E5 From SA entitlement, a licensed user may have one local copy of Office Professional Plus for their sole use during the subscription. If your organisation still uses Office Professional Plus under that entitlement, the retained Project provision recognises those devices too, subject to the user's Plan 3/5 licence. The selective deletions sit alongside surviving deployment rights and Microsoft's separate service-retirement guidance.

Microsoft's documentation calls the team-member service Project Online Essentials, while the deleted Product Terms table entry is Project Essentials Add-on. The retirement guidance establishes the closure of Project Online; the Product Terms show which add-on references have been removed. The removal of those entries gives no basis for treating every product containing “Project” as withdrawn.

Microsoft 365 A7 and G7 extend the suite choices

The 1 October 2026 Product Terms announcement records the addition of Microsoft 365 Education A7, Microsoft 365 G7 and Government Community Cloud (GCC) Agent 365 to the availability tables. Those entries introduce new suite combinations for education and United States government buyers to compare with their existing subscriptions. The date identifies the terms update; the separate G7 announcement below confirms when that government offer became purchasable.

For an education institution already using A5, the starting point is familiar. A5 includes the Office desktop apps, email and file collaboration, together with identity, device-security and information-protection services. A7 Faculty keeps that foundation and adds four packages: Intune Suite, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Entra Suite and Microsoft Agent 365. Your comparison with A5 therefore centres on the work those additions enable and whether you already license any of them separately.

The additions serve different people within the institution. Copilot works inside the productivity apps, helping users draft documents or analyse spreadsheets. Intune Suite extends the tools for managing, securing and supporting devices. Entra Suite extends identity and network-access controls, while Agent 365 gives administrators visibility and control over the AI agents used in the organisation, including their permissions and lifecycle. Buying the larger suite brings those capabilities alongside the email and Office applications your users already have.

The student package requires a separate comparison. Microsoft's A7 Student description starts with A5 Student and the same four additions, then expressly includes Defender for Endpoint P2 for Student and Microsoft 365 A5 Information Protection and Governance for Students. Those extra device-security and information-protection entitlements belong in the comparison with your existing student licences. The faculty package alone does not describe everything in the paid student offer.

Government buyers face a related decision, although the combination differs. G5 already supplies Office desktop apps, email, file collaboration and conferencing, together with identity protection, device security and information-protection services. G7 adds Copilot, Entra Suite and Agent 365 to that package. The Entra addition extends identity and access controls; Agent 365 gives administrators tools to discover, register, manage, deploy, block and remove AI agents. For an organisation adopting agents across its workforce, the larger suite combines the assistance employees use with controls for the teams responsible for that use.

A7 and G7 add different things to the suites below them. A7 Faculty adds four packages to A5: Intune Suite, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Entra Suite and Microsoft Agent 365. G7 adds three to G5: Copilot, Entra Suite and Agent 365.

Microsoft 365 G7 and standalone Agent 365 became available to buy for Government Community Cloud customers on 1 October. Microsoft's announcement, updated on 1 October 2026, distinguishes that initial availability from additional purchasing options on 1 November. It also says capabilities will arrive in phases as workloads complete the required government-cloud authorisations. If you are comparing a G7 purchase with an existing government subscription, the launch-day capabilities and the later rollout remain distinct parts of that comparison.

As at 1 October 2026, Microsoft's suite descriptions and G7 announcement identify components without quoting A7 or G7 subscription prices. The announcement covers GCC. It makes no equivalent launch announcement for GCC High or Department of Defense environments.

A7's student benefit remains a specified package

Buying A7 for faculty or staff does not give every student the complete A7 Student suite. The new Student Use Benefit row provides 40 student instances per paid qualifying faculty, staff or knowledge-worker licence under Enrollment for Education Solutions (EES) and the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) programme. The package is Office 365 A5 Student Use Benefit, Enterprise Mobility + Security A5 Student Use Benefit, Windows Education A3 Student Use Benefit and Minecraft: Education Edition.

That is the same named student-benefit package as the existing A5 row. Copilot, Entra Suite and Agent 365 do not become student entitlements simply because they appear in the paid A7 suite. The 1 October terms retain the existing limitations. Student Use Benefit licences do not carry Software Assurance benefits. The Windows benefit is E3/A3, with Azure Virtual Desktop access but no further Windows virtualisation rights. An institution comparing the faculty purchase with its student estate has two different sets of entitlements to cost and deploy.

The add-on table changes eligibility, with an unresolved Viva entry

From 1 October 2026, the Microsoft 365 prerequisite table recognises the new suites for several add-ons. A prerequisite is the base licence a user must hold for the listed add-on; being named in that table does not itself include the add-on in the base package.

Source: Microsoft 365 Product Terms, comparing the preceding version with 1 October 2026.

Microsoft's suite guidance separately identifies Copilot as an A7 and G7 component. The prerequisite additions alone do not give you Priva, SharePoint Advanced Management or Clipchamp Premium at no additional charge.

The Microsoft Viva row contains a different change. Its Office 365 prerequisites previously included E1, E3 and E5. The 1 October 2026 version removes E1 and adds Office 365 E7. Microsoft 365 E7 was already listed in the same row, so the new Office 365 wording cannot be explained simply as adding Microsoft 365 E7. Microsoft's published suite guide lists Microsoft 365 E7 but does not identify an Office 365 E7 suite, leaving the two documents inconsistent as at 1 October 2026.

If your planned Viva purchase relies on Office 365 E1, you have lost the table's explicit confirmation that it qualifies. The unexplained Office 365 E7 replacement does not resolve that eligibility question. Nor can the blank prerequisite cell in the following Employee Communications and Communities row be read as permission for anyone to buy that product without an underlying licence.

Career Coach has disappeared from the prerequisite table altogether. Microsoft has deleted the row that previously named Office 365 A1/A3/A5 and Microsoft 365 A3/A5. The table records the removal of those prerequisites, but gives you no new date for retirement of the service.

Elsewhere in the prerequisite table, Microsoft has regrouped existing plan names and changed punctuation and spacing, including in rows that also contain the additions described above. Those presentation changes add no further eligible plans.

Azure IoT Operations adds an Essentials edition

Azure IoT Operations connects equipment data with the systems that process and use it. For an industrial organisation, that can involve collecting information near the equipment, preparing it locally and sending it to cloud services. The software runs on Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes infrastructure, allowing cloud management of the local deployment.

On 1 October 2026, Microsoft renamed the existing Azure IoT Operations terms to Azure IoT Operations Standard and introduced Essentials. The existing entry's Standard name is carried through the use cases, component restrictions, included components, connector names, OPC UA commanding service and schema registry provisions. The rename retains the existing limits and conditions; the amended provision specifies neither a technical migration nor a price change.

For Essentials, your deployment must fit within a single Kubernetes node, one machine in the environment running the software. Each instance allows two users of the operations experience portal, 50 concurrent data-flow endpoints and two data-flow graphs. The operations experience is the browser interface for managing devices, assets and data flows. Its user limit concerns that interface, rather than general access to the Azure portal. A data-flow graph is a configurable pipeline for processing and routing data.

Source: Azure Product Terms, Standard and Essentials sections as at 1 October 2026.

The OPC UA restriction is an express prohibition on using that connector with Essentials. OPC UA, or OPC Unified Architecture, is a standard used to exchange industrial equipment information. Microsoft's service overview describes its connector sending equipment data into the local messaging service. If your intended deployment relies on that connection, fitting within Essentials' node and user limits would not make the connector permitted.

As at 1 October 2026, Microsoft's IoT Operations pricing page lists general IoT Operations pricing without a separate Standard-versus-Essentials comparison. The lower Essentials usage limits alone give you no published saving to apply to a cost comparison between the two editions.

Hosting and component restrictions affect the deployment you can run

A successful trial does not establish that you may run the same deployment in production. The Essentials terms allow production use, but prohibit it on Listed Provider clouds. Microsoft defines that category by reference to its published Listed Providers document, as the Product Terms glossary explains. If you host the software in a provider's cloud, that classification affects whether you can use it for live operations. The restriction concerns the cloud environment in which IoT Operations runs.

You have more freedom when testing. Non-production and trial use may take place on both Listed Provider and non-Listed Provider clouds, with trials subject to the pricing description linked from the terms. Standard retains the same division. An organisation can therefore have permission to test in an environment where it would not have permission to put the deployment into production.

There is a further restriction inside the software itself. Both editions limit the REST/HTTP, SSE, ONVIF, media and MQTT connectors to non-production and trial use, whether the cloud is a Listed Provider's or another provider's. The product's general permission for production use does not extend to those named components. Moving to a permitted hosting environment would address the hosting restriction, but leave the connector restriction in place.

To understand which parts of a proposed deployment are affected, it helps to distinguish the connections. Representational State Transfer (REST) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) support web-service connections; server-sent events (SSE) carry event updates. For cameras, Open Network Video Interface Forum (ONVIF) provides the network-camera connection, while the media connector makes camera media available to the system. The Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) connector links other messaging systems to IoT Operations. Microsoft's connector descriptions explain those routes. Each of these named connectors falls within the non-production and trial restriction, and Standard retains the same restriction on its OPC UA commanding service.

For every Essentials use case, you may not separate its components for standalone use or use with another product or service, or replace them with third-party components. Essentials may include other Microsoft components identified on Microsoft's included-components page; use of those components, as described in their associated documentation, is governed by these licence terms.

The schema registry stores definitions describing the messages handled by the system. The Azure terms permit the Azure Device Registry schema feature in production, non-production and trials, with a limit of 200 schemas per registry. That permission and limit apply to both Essentials and Standard.

Security and compliance terms move into product-family pages

Microsoft's 15 September explanation describes a navigation reorganisation, with a Security and Compliance entry point linking to Microsoft Defender, Defender Experts, Microsoft Entra, Enterprise Mobility + Security, Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Purview. The announcement describes moving availability, prerequisites and service-specific provisions under the relevant product families, with links from the earlier locations. As at 1 October, the landing page links to all six families.

If you use bookmarked security licensing pages, the new landing page provides a route to those reorganised terms. Microsoft expressly says that relocating the clauses does not change licensing rights, use rights, entitlements or obligations. The 15 September notice, still published on 1 October, also preserves references to Azure terms where applicable for consumption services such as Entra External Identities and Defender for Cloud.

Get an independent view before your next Microsoft decision

If you need to establish which rights survive a product retirement, whether your AI application fits Microsoft's new conditions, or what an Azure capacity commitment could cost before deployment, we can help you work through the terms and your agreements. SAMexpert does not sell Microsoft licences or cloud services. Our advice is independent of the purchase Microsoft wants you to make.