Are you being too generous with your M365 licences?

Are you being too generous with your M365 licences?

Bedroq work with businesses all over the UK and typically we see IT managers encountering the same licencing pitfalls time and time again, so if you find you’re being overgenerous with Microsoft 365 licences rest assured you’re not alone. The good news is there’s an easy fix, which we’ll explain in this article. As part of our Boardroom Briefing covering how businesses are using Microsoft 365, Bedroq’s Consultant IT Director Adam Plevin gave us some insights into where your business could potentially be wasting money on licencing. This is the first of five challenges we set out in our Boardroom Briefing, to discover the rest download the paper here.

A review could simplify your licensing and save money

First up, check the number of named user accounts against you have against the staff on your payroll. We almost always find a number of unused or dormant accounts. There are many reasons for this. Most commonly, licenses continue for people who are no longer in the business, or from parts of the business that have been sold, or integrated. In one case, in a business with 30 employees we unearthed a total of 96 licenses.

are you being too generous with your m365 licences?

One of the benefits of M365 is that problems like this can easily be identified and solved. Many businesses hit straight out and provide everyone with a full-fat E5 licence. This seems fair and reasonable, until you realise that very few staff are likely to use the advanced analytical tools or the voice capabilities that are included. At nearly half the price, an E3 licence is more than sufficient for most people.

A sensible recommendation is to run a business process audit to ensure that the licenses are matched to needs. But there is a brutally simple approach: for one of our clients we switched 700 users from E5 to E3 licences overnight. We waited nervously to see what would happen, ready to switch on necessary licenses at short notice. But, after a week, there were no complaints, and a £10,000 per month saving to boot. We’d generally recommend a more nuanced approach. Microsoft’s dashboards can be used to measure application usage, with appropriate licenses allocated to each user to ensure the most cost-effective distribution.