ADMINHANDBOOKVISUAL STUDIO SUBSCRIPTIONSADMIN HANDBOOK

Editor’s note

3

Assigning Visual
Studio subscriptions
••

7-16

What’s in a Visual
Studio subscription?
••••••••

Visual Studio
Azure dev/test individual credits
Azure dev/test pricing
DevOpsSoftware & downloads
Services
TrainingSupport

5

Why should I assign Visual
Studio subscriptions?

Quick startSuper admin capabilities

17

Admin best practices

20-21
Helpful links•••

For admins
For subscribers
About subscriptions

Support tools in one
place to help you do what
you need to do

Editor’s noteThis guide is designed to help you get
started managing subscriptions quickly,
while providing a clear explanation ofwhat’s in a Visual Studio subscription
and why assigning subscriptions isimportant to your role. It also includes
a comprehensive list of resources andsupport tools in one place to help you
do what you need to do.

VISUAL STUDIO SUBSCRIPTIONS ADMIN HANDBOOK

2Oh Hello!

Table of contents02

Assigning Visual
Studio Subscriptions
Quick start – Getting set up
This section is intended to help you get signed in andquickly begin managing Visual Studio subscriptions
in four short steps. There are additional resources
available in the helpful links section.

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Go to the Visual Studio subscriptions administration page at:https://aka.ms/VSSAdmin, choose “Admin portal sign-in” and sign in.
Bookmark https://manage.visualstudio.com for future use
to take you directly to the portal.
If you can’t sign in, a super admin on your agreement will be able to add you. For
information about being added, check out the FAQ section on the Visual Studiosubscriptions administration page referenced above.

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Once in the portal, you will be able to see available and assigned Visual Studiosubscriptions for your organization’s agreement(s). Portal functionalities depend
upon your role, but all roles can:4To take a tour of the portal, check out the videos for using theadmin portal on the Visual Studio subscriptions administration
page at: https://aka.ms/VSSAdmin.
You can also read about all the functionalities in our admin
docs: https://aka.ms/AssignVSS

In addition to assigning Visual Studio subscriptions, super admins havemore responsibilities and control over what happens in the Visual Studio
Subscriptions Administration Portal. They can:• Assign other super admins or admins• Set agreement-level preferences to auto-populate Visual Studiosubscription assignment information such as subscription level,
external employee access, download access, etc. Read more about
how to do this at: https://aka.ms/VSSAdminPrefs
To watch how to onboard as a super admin, check out the video for
new admins on the Visual Studio subscriptions administration pagereferenced above. You can also read about it in our admin docs: https://aka.ms/VSSAdminOnboarding• Add, edit and delete individual users• Add or edit multiple subscriptions using a simple Excel template• Assign Visual Studio subscriptions using Microsoft Entra groups(available for organizations with Enterprise agreements). Read more at:https://aka.ms/VSSadmin/assignmulti• View reporting about Visual Studio subscription assignments and track
maximum assignment levels04

Why should I assign
Visual Studio subscriptions?
• Improve productivity – the benefits and services included in Visual Studiosubscriptions provide a comprehensive set of resources to help your developers
work faster, smarter and deploy efficiently• Foster developer growth – the technical and professional training included ina subscription enables your developers to learn while Azure dev/test individual
credits help them explore and experiment with using Azure• Realize your org’s investment – ensure your organization gets the most value
out of their investment by assigning Visual Studio subscriptions

Visual Studiosubscriptions
include so much
more beyond theIDE to supportdevelopers.”

Visual Studio helps your developers write code quickly, collaborate, and analyze,
test, and deploy their applications. But there is so much more included in a Visual
Studio subscription that doesn’t come with the Visual Studio license. This guide will
explain all the different benefits included in detail.
Why is my role important?
Although your developers may use Visual Studio as a standalone license in yourorganization, without you to assign subscriptions to them, they won’t have accessto all the benefits that are available. By assigning a subscription, you’re unlocking
services and benefits for your developers, allowing them to accelerate their growth,
be more productive, and stay up to date with emerging trends and technologies.

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What’s in a subscription?
When people hear the name Visual Studio, they usually
think of the Integrated Development Environment, or IDE.
But Visual Studio subscriptions include so much morebeyond the IDE to support developers.

••••••Tools – Powerful software that enables
developers to innovate
Azure – An opportunity to learn andexplore cloud possibilities
Software Downloads – Access to thousands ofsoftware downloads for development and test
Services – Access to apps and services that
support different unique developer scenarios
Training – Resources to help developers
improve their technical and professional skills
Support – Help resolving any technicalissues along the way

We’ll go more in-depth for each of the benefits in the following pages.
Depending on which Visual Studio subscription your subscribers have,not all benefits are included. This handbook shares what is in the Visual
Studio Enterprise Subscription with GitHub Enterprise because it’s themost comprehensive subscription available. But for a comparison ofwhat’s included in the other Visual Studio subscription levels, visit thebenefits page at: https://aka.ms/VSSBenefits

Visual Studio
Visual Studio subscriptions ensure that your developers always haveaccess to the latest version of Visual Studio on PC and Mac, in addition
to all the previous versions.
Visual Studio Enterprise and Visual Studio Enterprise for Mac are thetools your developers can use to build applications. Visual Studio is anintegrated, end-to-end solution for teams of any size with demanding
quality and scale needs. In addition to writing code, Visual Studioenables them to analyze, debug, test, collaborate and deploy.
They can increase their productivity with IntelliTest, Live Unit Testing, andLive Dependency Validation which helps them deliver code with quality,accuracy and speed. This enables them to spend more time writing codeby infusing code quality right from the first line.
IntelliTrace, Snapshot Debugger, Code Map, Xamarin Profiler andXamarin Inspector help your developers understand the root cause ofissues quickly. They can fix bugs faster with these advanced debugging
and diagnostic tools whether they are working on desktop, web, cloud,or mobile apps.
Visual Studio is cloud-connected helping your developers stay up-todate and in the know, and more efficiently with built-in and downloadedfeatures. It also enables them to collaborate seamlessly without leaving
the development environment with Visual Studio Live Share. Live Shareenables your developers to collaboratively edit and debug code in realtime with anyone using their favorite tools. Pair programming, code
reviews, and more are made easy with shared servers, terminals, diffs,and comments.

What’s in a subscription?

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Azure dev/test individual credits

Azure Dev/test Pricing

Developers get up to $150 in dev/test individual credits to use tolearn and experiment in Azure. This means they can try running virtual
machines, storing data, and developing serverless apps in the cloudwith Azure. There’s no credit card required, so as an admin, you don’t
have to worry about unexpected charges going to your purchasingdepartment. When your Visual Studio subscribers reach the monthly cap
for their credits, their Azure services will stop until their next monthly
credits are added. If you choose to, you can remove the spending cap
by adding a credit card.

Your Visual Studio subscribers are eligible to receive discounted rates onAzure to support their ongoing development and testing. They also receive
cloud use rights of their subscription software on Azure to help theirAzure credits go farther. There are a few dev/test pricing options available
depending on your organization.

The $150 limit resets automatically each month while their Visual Studiosubscription is active, so you don’t need to do anything to make surethat they get their credits.
Curious to find out how far your subscribers’ $150 will stretch in Azure?
There are several different scenarios on our Azure for Visual Studiosubscriptions webpage. For each scenario, the pricing calculator autopopulates the cost so your subscribers know exactly how far theircredits will go.
To see for yourself, just visit our Azure for Visual Studio subscribers
webpage at: https://aka.ms/VSSAzureScenarios. Click on “Seeproduct and pricing details” for any of the scenarios and scroll to thebottom to see your estimate.

Enterprise Dev/test
If your organization has an Enterprise agreement with an Azure subscription,
you can get discounted pricing on Azure through our Enterprise Dev/
test offer. This is a specific Azure subscription type created in your Azure
enrollment portal that automatically provides the Azure discounted rates.

Pay-As-You-Go Dev/test
If your organization doesn’t have an Azure Enterprise agreement, this isa great way to get discounted Azure Dev/test pricing. You can set this up
through your Azure account with credit card billing (invoicing isalso available).
The Enterprise Dev/test offer and the Pay-As-You-Go Dev/test offer aredesigned to meet the non-production needs of teams with Visual Studiosubscribers. Your organization essentially receives a discount on Azure
for Microsoft products. These offers allow your developers to quickly get
their teams up and running with dev/test environments in the cloud using
pre-configured virtual machines, including Windows 10, and low rates on
Windows Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, SQL Database, HDInsight, App
Service and Logic Apps. With Azure you have the added benefits of providing
cost allocation to your users, and either to provided isolated environments
and subscriptions with separate bills and cost centers, or to simply charge
back based on usage.
What’s in a subscription?

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This offer is targeted at your software developers, and all those involved in thesoftware lifecycle, from admins to end users, and the entitlement stems from theircurrent Visual Studio subscription. Similar to on-prem MSDN, use rights extend toend users for additional usage and testing purposes, and those users do not needadditional Visual Studio subscriptions. Your organization will just pay the Linux rate for
VMs they run, even those VMs with SQL Server, SharePoint Server, or other softwarethat is normally billed at a higher rate. They can upload their own custom virtualmachine images or use one of our pre-configured images from the Azure Gallery.
They can also leverage Windows Virtual Desktop to quickly deploy and manage
hundreds of VMs for development and testing purposes.
For more details about the offers and how to set them up, visit:https://aka.ms/devtestPR

DevOpsAzure DevOps

GitHub Enterprise
GitHub Enterprise allows your developers to securely bring open source code,community, and best practices to their enterprise projects. It offers flexible
security, compliance, and deployment controls making it easy for your team touse GitHub Enterprise wherever they need it.
Your developers can get started faster and easier with built-in GitHub
extensions in Visual Studio. GitHub also has native integrations with Azure
DevOps allowing your developers to plan smarter and ship faster using
collaborative workflows and a set of modern dev services. They can associatebugs and tasks to the code to know when a bug fix is going out in a release,
all within Visual Studio. Developers can quickly clone their code from an online
repo on GitHub, Azure DevOps, or elsewhere. They can create repositories andmanage Git through changes and committed code in the IDE.

Azure DevOps provides developer services to help teams plan work, collaborate oncode development, and build and deploy applications. Developers can work in thecloud using Azure DevOps Services or on-premises using Azure DevOps Server. Your
subscribers can plan, build, and ship any app, for any platform. They can also use all
the Azure DevOps services, including Azure Pipelines, Azure Boards, Azure Repos,
Azure Test Plans and Azure Artifacts.

Software and downloads

Details about Azure DevOps services and what they can do for yourdevelopers are as follows:

The software includes current and past versions of Windows operating
systems, servers such as Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, R Server,SharePoint, Exchange, Dynamics and more.

•••••

Azure Repos provides Git repositories or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)
for source control of their code
Azure Pipelines provides build and release services to support continuous
integration and delivery of their apps
Azure Boards deliver a suite of Agile tools to support planning and tracking work,
code defects, and issues using Kanban and Scrum methods
Azure Test Plans provide several tools to test their apps, including manual/
exploratory testing and continuous testing
Azure Artifacts allow teams to share Maven, npm, and NuGet packages from publicand private sources and integrate package sharing into your CI/CD pipelines

Unlike the standalone Visual Studio product, Visual Studio subscriptions offer
your developers the ability to access more than a thousand Microsoft software
downloads to use for dev/test purposes. This will give them the opportunity totest their builds, code and more against a huge array of existing software.

Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers also have production use rights for Office
365 ProPlus and Office Professional Plus 2019. Download this Excel file for afull list of downloads: https://aka.ms/VSSsoftware

What’s in a subscription?

12ServicesYour developers receive a range of services to help them in their daily work. As
long as you’ve assigned a Visual Studio subscription to your developers, they
just need to sign in to the portal at https://my.visualstudio.com and activate
any of these services to get started. For information on activating Visual Studiosubscription benefits, check out https://aka.ms/VSSDocs.

Visual Studio App Center – App lifecycle management

Microsoft 365 Developer subscription (E5) – EMS and O365 combined

This service allows them to automate the lifecycle of their apps. They canconnect to their repo and within minutes build in the cloud, test on thousandsof real devices, distribute to beta testers and app stores, and monitor realworld usage with crash and analytics data—all in one place.

The Microsoft 365 E5 developer subscription includes an admin plus 24 user
licenses for developers to use to build solutions. Your Visual Studio subscribers candevelop with Microsoft Graph, SharePoint, Teams, Azure AD, Excel and Outlook.
It also offers expanded access to critical Microsoft 365 workloads and capabilities.
Developers with Microsoft 365 E5 sandbox subscriptions can take advantage of:Advanced analytics with Power BI• Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) for compliance and information protection• Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection• Microsoft Entra for building advanced identity and access management solutions

Your developers can build, test, deploy and monitor their iOS, Android,
Windows and macOS apps. They can ship higher-quality apps faster and withmore confidence.

Windows Developer AccountThis service lets your Visual Studio subscribers submit free and paid apps for
all Windows devices to the Windows Store.

•PowerBI Pro – Analytics for every org
Your developers can connect to all their data (including streaming sources) andtransform it into rich, interactive visualizations. They can share dashboards andcollaborate with colleagues to easily track KPIs and make data-driven decisions.

What’s in a subscription?

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WhiteSource Bolt

CODE Magazine

This helps your developers find and fix open source vulnerabilities and generatecomprehensive inventory and license reports of all open source components
in their builds.

The leading independent software development magazine covers dev
technologies across all platforms, and your subscribers canreceive it at no charge.

Training
Developers can take advantage of several training offers to improvetheir skills and stay up to date on the newest technologies. The various
offers provide customized training for specific use-case scenarios andallow your Visual Studio subscribers to learn skills that will help themtake their development projects to the next level.
They can access the Visual Studio subscription portal athttps://my.visualstudio.com to activate the training benefits included
with their subscription level, and immediately begin taking courses.

Pluralsight – Cloud, design, security, mobile and data
Advance your subscribers’ skills with courses from the Pluralsightcatalog. Get expert-authored courses, learning paths, adaptive skill
measurement and more.

LinkedIn Learning – Business, technology and creative training

SupportEven seasoned developers need help and support. Your subscribers
have several support options available to help them on theirdevelopment journey when they come up against tough scenarios.

Technical Support
Depending on which Visual Studio subscription your developer has,they will receive up to four Microsoft technical support incidents.
These provide help to your subscribers to resolve break-fix issues in
non-production environments.

Concierge Chat – 24/7 support
Your subscribers can chat with us for assistance finding technicaldocumentation and product information or using theirsubscription benefits.

Unlock the power of LinkedIn with access to the people, insights, andskills your developers need to advance their careers.

DataCamp – Data science and AI
DataCamp helps companies and individual learners make better use ofdata. Your subscribers can build data fluency online while learning fromthe world’s top data scientists.
What’s in a subscription?

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Admin Best Practices
Below are some recommendations to ensure you and yourorganization are set up for success.
• Be sure to opt-in to the Visual Studiosubscriptions admin newsletters toensure you know when there are
new features and changes impacting
your role as an admin. Manage
your preferences and assignment
settings at: https://aka.ms/
VSSAdminProfile and make sure
you check the box for Visual Studiosubscriptions.
• If you’re a super admin, make sure
you have more than one superadmin for your organization. Thisway if you’re out of the office, youalways have a back-up person to
add admins and subscribers. Super
admins can manage admins andsubscriptions, while admins can only
manage subscriptions.

• Encourage your subscribers totake advantage of the benefits
included with their Visual Studiosubscriptions by activating themand using them. Remind them toopt-in to the subscriber newslettersfor product and benefit updates.
• Periodically check the Visual Studiosubscriptions admin webpage,
as well as the Visual Studio
Subscriptions Admin Portal to makesure you don’t miss out on any
changes or news.

Supporttools in one
place to help
you do what
you needto do18

Helpful links
For admins:

For subscribers:• Visual Studio subscriptions admin
webpage at: https://aka.ms/VSSAdmin
This page gives you an overview of why you should
assign subscriptions, videos showing how to assign
subscriptions, an extensive FAQ section to help
answer questions as well as updates.

• Visual Studio subscriber portal: https://my.visualstudio.com
This is the direct link for subscribers to sign into their subscriptions.

• Visual Studio Subscriptions Admin Portal:
https://manage.visualstudio.com
This is the direct link to sign in to manage
subscriptions.
• How-to video playlist for Visual Studio subscriptions
admins: https://aka.ms/VSSAdminVideos• How-to documentation for Visual Studiosubscriptions admins:
https://aka.ms/VSSAdminDocs• Visual Studio subscriptions support for admins:
https://aka.ms/VSSAdminSupport• Azure for Visual Studio subscribers: https://aka.ms/AzureForVSS
This encourages Visual Studio subscribers to use their Azure dev/test
individual credits and shows ways to use them and pricing so thatthey can see how far their credits will go.

About subscriptions:• Visual Studio subscriptions: https://aka.ms/VSSubs
This is the general Visual Studio subscriptions overview page.
• Visual Studio Licensing and usage:
https://aka.ms/VSLicensing
This pdf provides information about licensing usage rights andscenarios for Visual Studio subscriptions.
• Visual Studio subscriptions benefit comparison page:https://aka.ms/VSSBenefits
You can choose a Visual Studio subscription on this page to see what
benefits are included in it, along with a short explanation.
• Visual Studio subscriptions pricing page:https://aka.ms/VSSPricing
This compares all different Visual Studio subscriptions andoffers pricing information.

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