This week I had an interesting conversation with a partner of ours who is currently doing a roll out of Microsoft 365 with one of their new customers. Like me they've been in the game for a while so the conversation was very open, fluid and candid. We discussed a few particular functionalities they were looking for. We also discussed things such as how the stack had evolved the last few years. But one of the interesting things they mentioned is that they felt Microsoft were beginning to put more advertising into their products. This interested me because over the past few months I am increasingly hearing similar things from others. Here are a few examples an increase in add-on/premium SKU's across the stack when E5 was supposed to be the all up SKU for everything. How panels are explicitly calling out trials. More services subject to self-service sign ups. More nudges and flyouts to use functionality in the portals and more services based upon Azure subscriptions and the consumption model as well as SKU's such as the Power Platform. Now, this isn't throwing shade on Microsoft. It was pretty much expected they'd develop a commercially harder posture and tack post-pandemic given a slowdown. The issue is this - in their desire for us to transact, to grow numbers and recoup on their acquisitions or engineering investments, it can create certain headaches for admins looking to perform controlled rollouts of services and a high level of governance. Viva Goals is an example we discussed where the partner is looking to roll this out in the near future. Assuming that trials aren't restricted in the tenant any user can sign up for it. Once signed up, multiple organizations can be created by anyone who is licenced. By default, anyone in Goals can create Teams, and Tags and export OKR's. In other words, admin's could be on the back foot if they don't take any governance actions and simply assign the licencing. So this one is for said partner: three ways to ensure better governance with Viva Goals. Completely optional, the choice is yours.