Emails from ITS regarding OneDrive Limit
If you’d rather read it for yourself, check out this blog post. It explains it pretty well in layman’s terms. https://blog.shi.com/next-generation-infrastructure/are-you-prepared-for-the-end-of-office-365-a1-plus-and-unlimited-cloud-storage/
OK, so WHAT IS GOING ON? Microsoft is changing storage allocations for all institutions, all users, everywhere based on the types of licenses they have. The VAST majority of WSU users have what’s called an A1 Plus License. Microsoft announced they are retiring those on August 1, 2024 and WSU is in the process of figuring out what to do. Some users may be able to move to an regular A1 (no plus) license, but likely the vast majority will need to move to the next level, which is an A3 license. The shift from A1Plus to A3 will be VERY expensive and “the powers that be” are working on it. (FYI, regular A1 licenses will not work for most of our users because they DO NOT include the use of actual Office clients, only the web based versions. I can’t wait until we try to tell financial folks that they have to use the web version of Excel. )
Why did the proverbial “stuff” hit the fan in the last 24 hours? – WSU’s Microsoft Office 365 admins used to be able to allocate our total pool of storage for their users any way they saw fit. As such, our defaults for OneDrive were set for 1TB across the board or 5TB in some cases. Well, Microsoft decided that on February 1st, 2024 (6 months before the rest of the changes) that anyone with an A1 Plus license will be chopped down to 100GB per user of OneDrive storage and we can’t override that. WSU had originally been told we would NOT be affected by the February 1st change but found out last week that was misinformation and we would in fact be impacted. Mass pandemonium set in and we had a whole bunch of emergency meetings last Friday. Our Central ITS folks worked with Microsoft and they agreed to give us TEMPORARY licenses to grandfather impacted users to get us through our renewal period, which is July 1st, 2024. Because we renew on 7/1 and the total storage allocation change from Microsoft doesn’t go into effect until your first renewal AFTER 8/1/2024, we had been told that we would not be impacted until our renewal on 7/1/2025. Call it “bait and switch” or “misinformation”, either way we were in a bit of a panic for several days.
Why did I receive 2 emails? Last night, 1/31, those users that were impacted (Users with an A1 Plus license AND over 100GB in OneDrive) were sent an email that probably should only have said “ Due to licensing changes by Microsoft, your Office 365 license is being upgraded at 8pm. We don’t expect a disruption, but it is possible that we will see glitches between 8-9pm while the license upgrade is taking place.” Then today, all users were sent a note about their quota changing, effective immediately, to 100GB instead of the previous 1TB or 5TB. Unfortunately, this has created yet another round of confusion and chaos. That is why I’m emailing you, to hopefully help clear it up.
What’s next? The truth is, it is in flux. We going to have to figure out how many A3 licenses we’re going to need and how much that’s going to cost. We’re still sorting out what will be impacted on 7/1/2024 and subsequently 7/1/2025 when the official change hits. Central ITS is working feverishly on this. I’ll let you all know if I hear something.
Is there any good news? YES! The new limits only affects OneDrive for the users listed. It does not affect Teams, SharePoint and Email storage quotas. (It may in the future, but we’ll know more once the licensing is settled.)Any final info? Please DO pay attention to how much you are using in OneDrive and get rid of the stuff you don’t need to keep around. It will make things easier down the road. Please DO NOT rush out and buy subscriptions to Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, etc. until we know what is going to happen. Many of those other solutions ARE NOT compliant for storing FERPA or WSU protected data. We know more as we go through this process and figure out a path together. If you go your own separate ways, it can have catastrophic effects that will be unmanageable.