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Microsoft Expanding IUR for Cloud Partners

More internal use rights (IURs) are now available to certain categories of Microsoft partners to allow them to broaden their experience with the new Office 365 E5 suite and to better enable them to create customer demos for Dynamics CRM Online.

Gavriella Schuster, general manager of Microsoft Worldwide Partner Programs, unveiled the new benefits this week in a blog post that also discussed the availability of the new Windows and Devices competency.

Microsoft released the E5 SKU of Office 365 in December and previously only made its IURs available to partners with the Gold Cloud Productivity competency. Some of the features exclusive to the enterprise-focused E5 suite include analytics for business intelligence and e-discovery, secure attachments and URLs, access control, cloud PBX and PSTN conferencing.

Under the new IUR scheme for E5, 100 IURs are available to Gold Cloud Productivity and Gold Communication competency partners. Partners at the silver level for either competency now get 25 IURs.

At the same time, Microsoft is making changes on the Dynamics CRM side to give partners more flexibility to create demo environments for customers.

"We hear from many CRM Online partners that you're building complex demo environments to showcase the value of the solution, and a renewable, 12-month demo environment would help you make full use of what you've built," Schuster wrote in the blog. "So, we're extending demo tenants for CRM and Cloud CRM competency partners: All CRM and Cloud CRM competency partners now receive up to 10 instances of Office 365 E3 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Professional through the Microsoft Partner Download portal."

The changes are among a number of tweaks that Schuster has announced over the last few weeks as Microsoft readies changes to the Microsoft Partner Network for its next fiscal year, which starts July 1.

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 27, 2016


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