In response to rising license costs for software and online services, including UVM’s agreement with Microsoft, we are implementing a more effective and sustainable approach to Microsoft 365 licensing.

These updates will help optimize resources, improve support, and simplify management while continuing to provide essential services to our community. 

UVM is changing its practices around Microsoft 365 licenses in the following ways: 

  1. People who primarily use their LCOM (@med.uvm.edu) accounts will receive an A1 (free) license for their UVM netid account.  LCOM accounts will continue to have access to a full A3 license. 

  2. People whose accounts are created as “Person of Interest”, “Affiliated Organization Employees”, or “Temporary” employees will receive an A1 (free) license for their UVM netid account. 

The A1 license provides web-based access to UVM email and M365 services like Teams, as well as the web-app versions of the Microsoft Office applications (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint). It doesn’t provide access to desktop versions of Microsoft Office. We appreciate that this shift in practice may create some inconvenience. 

We also understand that there may be situations where people in the above groups might need the desktop versions of Office 365 applications or other services that depend on an A3 license. We can provide licenses when such a need is identified through this request form. 

We’ve created this Knowledge Base article to explain the new standard licensing practices. Microsoft 365 – Licensing and Affiliation – UVM Knowledge Base. Questions about these changes may be directed to the ETS Tech Team. 

We hope the UVM community understands the importance of careful management of our resources.