Microsoft increases Partner Access Licenses for SharePoint Online

Microsoft has just announced that it is increasing the limits of Partner Access Licenses (PALs) in SharePoint Online, as well as cutting the cost… to be effectively free!

Partner Access Licenses allow Office 365 customers to grant external users access to their SharePoint Online site collections.
The permissions that PALs have are:
• PALs are granted permission by the site admin and they can have (Read, Contribute, or Own)
• PALs that are Owners have the ability to invite of PALs
• PALs can read documents, but cannot edit them via the Web Apps
• PALs can get site feeds, but they do not get a MySite, cannot receive company feeds, nor can they follow others

The new limits are:

Some additional information about how PALs work:
How are the free PALs counted?Customers can invite as many external users to their SharePoint site(s) as they wish and a PAL is counted when a user is authenticated into a site. Once a user has authenticated into a site a PAL license has been consumed.

Can PALs be reused by a different user?
If an external user accesses a site they’ve consumed a PAL license. The PAL license can be reused when a tenant Admin deletes the PAL user allowing a new PAL user to access a site.