Take Charge of Your Microsoft Office License Renewal

Before diving in, let's define a few terms that we're going to be using today. 

• Active licenses: Users that have a license in the tenant and use Microsoft workloads every day. Or what we like to call the "Goldilocks" where everything is just right. 
• Assigned licenses: A license to a service account or user that may (or may not be used). For example, we can take a look at how many of your E3s and your E5's could potentially be moved to something like F3s.
• Unassigned licenses: Represent inventory like boxes of software on a shelf and are available to be assigned to other individuals. 
• Unused licenses: A license that has been assigned, but there's no activity. That stems from multiple reasons - left the company, an issue with your deprovisioning process, could be on leave, or over licensed an individual.

The Importance of Analyzing Unused E5 Microsoft Office Licenses 

First, we need to understand the impact of removing or adjusting a license and how that would impact the user's ability to do their job on a daily basis. Things like mailbox size and if they are accessing an exchange like OneDrive. 

It is important to keep your unused license numbers at a very low level, just enough to cover any growth or emergencies. 

Typically, 30% of what an entity is spending on a Microsoft E5 license is tied up in unused and unassigned licenses. 

How CoreView Helps Sort Unused E5 Licenses

CoreSuite is able to collect all of this activity data-who, what user is using, what component, etc. And we can automate and schedule reports that highlight that usage and the things that need to be changed.  

What does that mean?

CoreView optimizes the spend if we're properly capturing licenses of those individuals that have left the company and putting them back in the pool to be used by somebody else. 

Drive Usage of Microsoft E5 Licenses

Forget exporting data from 3 different M365 admin centers, combining the data in Excel, and then writing fiddly, fragile PowerShell scripts to make the required updates.

Report on nearly anything to do with your Office 365 instance, and then take immediate action to resolve any issues you find, right from CoreView.

You can drill down on license usage and see who has used Microsoft Teams in the last 90 days and let that information empower you to drive some adoption in that context.

By leveraging workflows you can make the deprovisioning process more efficient with less human intervention and more automation. 

Now that we've identified the E5 waste, what's the process?

1. Understand the business expectations around EA since there are different contractual obligations.
2. Ramifications and what the capabilities are. 
3. Identify the users that aren't leveraging the technology.
4. Communicate directly with that specific group of users.
5. Deprovision those unused licenses into unassigned. 

How to Deprovision Users in Microsoft Office 365

1. Jump into CoreView and use one of our out-of-the-box reports: This report will allow me to focus on a particular skew, like my E5s. Understand how those E5s are distributed across the various attributes in my tenant, and also understand how those workloads within that license have been consumed.
2. Analyze the numbers. For example, from an E3 or an E5 perspective, to move to something like an F3. There's certain data you need to bring to bear - mailbox size, how they're accessing outlook, etc.  
3. Schedule to run a disabled licensed users report monthly - this report indicates are individuals whose credentials are blocked. 
4. With a workflow you can send an email to those that have had their credentials blocked and ask the manager if this is accurate? 
5. If the answer is yes, CoreView takes that license away and puts it in the pool to be assigned to another individual.  

For one customer, this workflow was about to save 220,000 seats and saved them 15% in their new license reservations in the first year. All by simply harvesting licenses and putting them back in the pool to be used by somebody else. As opposed to a new license reserved.

How CoreView Can Help Gain Full Value of Microsoft Office 365 

CoreView offers capabilities that enhance your Microsoft tenants, like virtual tenants, and license pools to create chargebacks singular, and granular permissions. 

By surfacing information in a manner that makes it very easy for you to act upon that information. Want to learn more? Schedule your demo today.