Visual Studio Online licenses will change (in better)

Through the fall and spring, Visual Studio Online transitioned from Preview to General Availability.  That process included changes to branding, the SLA, the announcement of pricing, the end of the early adopter program and more.

Now, the VSO/TFS team has decided to roll out these 2 major licensing changes in the next couple of months:

• any VS Online account will be able to have an unlimited number of “Stakeholder” users with access to the a subset of functionality, at no charge.
• the Visual Studio Online Advanced plan will include access to all of the Test hub functionalities 

The team is working hard to implement these licensing changes now and the expectation is that they’ve got about 2 sprints of work to do to get it all finished.  That would put the effective date somewhere in the neighborhood of mid-August.

In general, the team goal is to keep the licensing for VS Online and Team Foundation Server as “parallel” as they can – to limit how confusing it could be.  As a result, they will be evolving the current “Work Item Web Access” TFS CAL exemption (currently known as “Limited” users in TFS) to match the “Stakeholder” capabilities.  That will result in significantly more functionality available to TFS users without CALs.  The hope is to get that change made for Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 4.


Here you can find the original announcement by Brian Harry:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2014/07/09/upcoming-vs-online-licensing-changes.aspx