How to Optimize Office 365 License Types

Office 365 licensing can be a tricky endeavor. Most enterprises must purchase more seats than they need to facilitate scale, streamline hiring, and remain flexible. Plus, they usually purchase a few more higher-tier licenses than they need — just in case.

But the extra licenses — and the higher license tiers — can add up. Organizations that don’t frequently audit their Office 365 licensing often overpay significantly each month. Furthermore, many organizations pay for functions that they don’t need and never use, contributing even more spend into the waste pile.

Here’s how you can ensure that your organization optimizes its spend on office productivity suites.

Keep Track of Licenses!

As the saying goes: you can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you don’t keep track of all your licenses you can’t manage them. That goes for how many licenses you have, what license types you have, and how your staff uses those licenses.

If your enterprise is large enough, you may have someone in charge of auditing and managing your software licenses. Or, more likely, you outsource that task.

However, if you don’t occasionally assess your licenses, then you won’t even know if you have a problem. Or how much you’re overpaying. Or how to optimize!

How Business Strategy Affects Licensing

Business level plans are often cheap and include a basic suite of productivity features, applications, and services.

Enterprise-level plans generally include more advanced, comprehensive productivity suites, features, applications, and so on. Enterprise-level plans also come with some form of compliance framework and added security.

Both business- and enterprise-level plans feature several tiers of Office 365 licenses. Higher-tier licenses get more features, storage, and so on. Lower-tier licenses get fewer features, but they cost much less.

The larger the business, the more wiggle room needed for new hires, promotions, and so on. Smaller businesses are better able to keep on top of their employee needs, and so licensing issues are kept under tighter control.

What this means is that larger organizations necessarily buy more Office 365 seats and higher license tiers than they need, all in order to simplify growth. In contrast, smaller companies generally keep tighter controls in place to maximize their spend.

By auditing and assessing license agreements, larger enterprises stand to save tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

License Audits and Assessments

Here are a few things that you should get from an Office 365 license audit or assessment:

1. A usage report that tells you how many seats your organization pays for, what kind of licenses those seats use, any additional services you pay for, and how all the features are used.

2. A consumption report that tells you how much OneDrive storage your organization uses.

3. An exchange usage report that shows how much storage you have vs. how much you need, whether passwords are out of date, and if you have extraneous user accounts.

4. A security report that highlights needs for multi-factor authentication, outdated passwords, or other vulnerabilities.

5. A license tier comparison that suggests which licenses can downgraded, repurposed, or closed.

6. An overview of findings and recommendations that offers an at-a-glance takeaway of all the above reports.

The occasional licensing assessment and audit can save literally hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. And that’s on Office 365 alone!

Where to Get Your License Assessment

Hypershift is a consulting organization focused on SaaS, subscription software, and cloud technologies. We help organizations navigate their shift toward subscription software models. Our mission is to ensure best-in-class security, support, and management to optimize enterprise-level cloud strategies.

We offer free rapid license assessments of Microsoft agreements, including a partial overview of Office 365 usage and patterns, cost optimization recommendations, and security vulnerabilities. You can use this assessment to cut wasted spend and evaluate a licensing renewal.

You can learn more about hypershift at www.hypershift.com.