Comment by vtbassmatt
3 hours ago
Yes. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft. But I also am the volunteer IT guy at a nonprofit, and am speaking entirely in that context.
I was quite unhappy to get a mail back in (checks archives) January that our grant would be discontinued and we’d either have to make do with the web versions of things, migrate someplace, or start paying. They also reminded us several more times before the drop date. I don’t really understand why Microsoft chose to discontinue the nonprofit grants, and it put a little egg on my face after I had recommended it to our board — but they definitely notified us of the change and what it would mean.
We’ve opted to pay for now; it’s $3/user/month for the SKU that gets full desktop versions of Office, Teams, etc. so not really breaking the bank compared to all the other things we have to pay for.
A non-profit I help out sometimes, was affected, and I have to say the emails were not that clear. Because it's hard to figure out what is part of a license, the free tier etc. I let it lapse, because we migrated of Office, but apparently the license also applied to Intune.
Fine, so I bought licenses but apparently Microsoft deletes "some" of the data. All groups were still there, users and the device ids.. but not the devices themselves. I could see all devices associated to a user but couldn't recreate or restore them in device management. Thus, I had to re-enroll multiple devices. Will migrate off Intune in the future, since it's garbage but haven't found a good alternative for Android devices yet.
If 150,000+ organisations were caught by surprise, I would say it’s clear whatever communication they had was not adequate.
Organisations that didn’t have an off-boarding option (do nothing, pay the minimum, I’ll deal with it) selected should receive monthly reminders, then every 2 weeks (to multiple people), and one per week until a VERY alarming one the week before. And, of course, have all systems shut down and the data archived for a grace period.
I hope they sue Microsoft for what seems neglect.
I think we should take the headline claim that "over 170k nonprofits lost all their data" with a huge grain of salt.
As far as I can tell, the only source for that claim is:
> And he later learned he wasn’t alone, when another company service representative called the very next day and told him that roughly 171,000 small nongovernmental organizations “lost everything” in their OneDrive accounts.
So a second hand account of remarks said over the phone by a low level employee/contractor.
That's an interesting data point to follow up on, but using a single indirectly relayed statement to make such a substantial claim doesn't seem consistent with journalistic standards.
[dead]
Does that mean it is 170000 * 10 * 3 = 5,100,000 per month (assuming 10 users per org)? Isn’t that less than found in the cushion level money for a trillion dollar company?