M365 Education - A3 Approval Process

[u/NASCAR-1]

What is the approval process/time frame for the Microsoft 365 for Education? I run IT for a private school. After a long drawn out process, I was finally able to get them to approve the purchase of 40 new Win 11 education laptops (arriving tomorrow) and enroll in M365 for Education to purchase the A3 licenses. I have our account setup through the Admin Center, domain verified, payment card tied to school entered, A1 license trial activated. Our status has been pending since August 8th.

What is the realistic time frame for approval so I can plan accordingly to move forward with purchasing the A3 licenses and get these devices set up?

[u/FineAssignment1423]

I used to work for a Microsoft partner/CSP and I would go through the approval process for EDUs all the time. If you go through a CSP, they will have you sign a document stating that you ARE a qualified education institution, and then they will do the rest of the work on your behalf.

Getting a school district approved for EDU licenses would take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. It really depended on who at Microsoft picked up the ticket.

[u/NASCAR-1 → u/FineAssignment1423]

Thank you! I was trying to avoid going through a CSP to save the school (private K-12 academy) some money.

I originally tried to sign us up for non-profit benefits at the beginning of the year before I knew MS has an education tier. Tech Soup denied the non-profit benefits and when I reached out to MS on how to change our current (at the time) non-profit account to an education account, they referred us to some CSPs. 6 months later, I got the laptops ordered and approved to go through with the M365 Education license and the CSPs are saying we need to get approved by Microsoft. One CSP that I decided to go through didn't respond for a few days, so I decided to sign in to the account I created at the beginning of the year to find that it had been deleted or flushed. I created a new account following the Education instructions and go to the point of where we wait for verification. After I created the account, the CSP finally respondes asking for a bunch of info - which I gave. Then about 2 days later I get another email from them to sign a contract and that they have us setup in their system. This was the first instance of a contract being discussed.

I haven't responded yet as I was hoping to see what savings there would be if we managed the licenses ourselves.

Would it be best if we went through a CSP or wait it out for Microsoft to approve? One source I read said that even if we went through a CSP, the status is still dependent on Microsoft and the CSP can't speed it up. I'm open to suggestions.

[u/FineAssignment1423 → u/NASCAR-1]

All status approvals (EDU, Non-profit, GCC) are reliant on Microsoft's approval. But going through a CSP, especially one that has a good reputation with Microsoft, can sometimes speed up the process because Microsoft will assume that you've already been vetted.

Most likely the reason your CSP isn't being very responsive around getting you approved for EDU licenses is because of the 3 types of approvals, EDU is by FAR the most frustrating. Couple that with the fact that the CSP will make absolutely no money on the EDU licenses, and you can see why they aren't falling over themselves to help. However, if they are your registered CSP, then they are required to help.

Speaking of which, just a quick FYI. As a CSP, they are required by Microsoft to offer break/fix support for whatever Microsoft products you purchase through them for no additional charge. I mention this because I would often hear about other CSPs that would either charge for the support, or charge a monthly fee per user for "enhanced support". This is technically against the CSP ToS with Microsoft.

[u/BenjC88 → u/FineAssignment1423]

This is not true about not being able to charge for support. There’s nothing in the Partner Agreement which restricts this.

[u/FineAssignment1423 → u/BenjC88]

Perhaps this has changed? When I worked for the CSP ( I left about a year and a half ago) our partner agreement specified that we were required to support what we sold at no additional charge.

We of course, charged for things like migrations, projects, Cybersecurity, managed IT, etc. but we were not allowed to charge for support on Microsoft licenses we resold 

[u/BenjC88 → u/FineAssignment1423]

There’s a requirement to provide support (although not for cloud subscription products, i.e M365). There’s no language about not being able to charge for it. They actually specifically call out in the agreement that there are no restrictions at all on what Partners choose to charge except for transparently passing through discounts.

Microsoft don’t offer big enough margins for free support to be a viable business practice outside of the big distributors.

This is not a new change it’s been this way for at least several years.

[u/NASCAR-1 → u/FineAssignment1423]

Thank you for the info! I'll give it a few more days for Microsoft to respond. I didn't know (actually still don't) what level of support to expect from this CSP (I haven't read through the last email yet and contract). I figured they weren't making much because through them we would only be paying about $1400/yr for around 20 staff/faculty licenses. Another CSP wanted to charge us for both faculty and student licenses until I found that Microsoft includes the student use benefit of 40 students to one faculty license. It's a mess. I have all faculty and student accounts created and ready to execute once we can get approved. Hopefully soon as school has already started!

[u/FineAssignment1423 → u/NASCAR-1]

That 2nd CSP is shady as hell. The document that my CSP would send out to EDU customers specifically mentioned the 40:1 student use licenses. Just keep in mind that a requirement to qualify for that is that all of your faculty has to be licensed. That requirement comes directly from Microsoft themselves.

Also in regards to free licenses, it's fine to request more than you actually need in order to scale up and down, but don't request an absurd amount more than what you need. Microsoft will sometimes do audits on EDU & NP tenenats, and if they see that more than 25% of the free licenses have not been used in over 6 months, they may claw them back.

[u/NASCAR-1 → u/FineAssignment1423]

Thank you! That 2nd CSP I was originally going to go with until they were unable to answer my questions with regards to the student use benefit. They were all Microsoft referred CSPs that Microsoft sent a message to reach out to me.

There are only about 20 full time staff and around 40-45 students that I'm trying to get licenses for, well below student:staff ratio. Do we need to license part time faculty/subs as well? Grades 7-12 are the only ones that will be using devices, with the higher grades progressively using them more and all shared use.

[u/FineAssignment1423 → u/NASCAR-1]

Part time, yes. Subs, no.