A review of your Microsoft 365 Licences could save as much at £10,000 a month

If you’re using Microsoft 365 in your business, now might be a good time to come up for air and and adjust your bearings.  There’s a reasonable likelihood that you are paying for licences in your business that have unused functionality.

We’re fond of the saying ‘What gets measured gets managed’

One of the first things you can ‘measure’ is the number of named user accounts 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. 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.

Licenses for SMEs

Microsoft have introduced a range of  good value ‘business’ licenses, with similar capabilities to the enterprise licenses, suitable for businesses with fewer than 300 users.

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.

Strategic Review of IT

If you’d like any help getting started with what to measure or you need a more strategic review of what technology you have, how it’s being used and whether you could be doing this more efficiently consider a strategic review.

Microsoft 365: It’s time for some paranoia

This post is an extract from our recent Boardroom Briefing, Microsoft 365: it’s time for some paranoia.  In this paper we suggest five areas where you could be saving money, tightening security or improving your back-up and business continuity processes.  Get the full briefing here

The Boardroom Briefing

Management teams are more conscious than ever of the importance of IT to their success, but less sure of how it works in their business. This is partly a matter of benchmarks: what measures do we have in place, what do we need and how do we judge? But it’s also a matter of instinct: ‘I know it’s developing all the time; I need to understand more than I do; I’m not sure it’s right, but I don’t know where to start’.

Our ‘Boardroom Briefing’ series is designed to provide CEOs, Operations and Finance Directors with insights into information technology that will help them to ask the right questions. It is based on the experience and knowledge of our technicians. Some of the language is necessarily technical but, we hope, not just jargon.