A: Office and Microsoft 365 are available with various services bundled in the offered license packages. To pick the right license, consider the following:
- Are you already using any comparable services?
- Would services bundled in the packages complement or replace already actively integrated and used services? Are there any bundled services not needed?
- What are the implementation/replacement costs for the services from the bundle?
- How willing are you to integrate your business tightly into a whole Microsoft suite?
In addition to answering these questions, review service usage data. This boosts license-type decision-making with concrete data.
Q: Should I mix licensing types?
A: It is common for companies to mix license types as access, feature, and function needs vary by employee type and role. This is why it is essential to do a thorough inventory of your current environment before deployment of the Microsoft 365 solution.
This step should also include the discovery of similar, existing services already in use and agreement on whether they will remain in use after the deployment of Microsoft 365. Keeping or leaving comparable services influences the decision on which license type is required for each employee type.
Q: Where do you see clients waste money with unused functionality?
A: Businesses often buy bulk licenses but only use a subset of a license’s available functionality. In other cases, companies underbuy and limit the productivity of key staff. Buy-to-fit is the best way to ensure cost efficiency without inhibiting work efforts. But this requires understanding who you’re buying for, where licenses exist, and what the use case is.
Once these are defined, monitor adoption and ongoing use. It is not enough to buy based on security features, for example, and select Microsoft 365 E5 version. You may find that only twenty percent of staff use the security functionality and that less than half of employees ever activate their Microsoft Apps suite. Schedule quarterly reviews to ensure proper license assignment.
Q: What are other businesses and enterprises doing to improve productivity, license management, or cost savings?
A: Businesses manage SaaS by creating adoption and migration plans. With platforms like LeanIX SaaS Management, it's much easier to track adoption and usage.
For example, we saw one enterprise buy Office E5 licenses for the majority of its employees. Yet, less than one percent of employees utilized the license’s advanced security features. More than eight percent of employees were never assigned a Microsoft 365 Apps license, and only seventy-six percent of users actually activated the product. Many users could have downgraded to an F1 license without losing needed functionality.
We helped the customer understand the situation, potential cost savings, and underutilization. SaaS visibility helped them adjust licenses and add processes to achieve smarter adoption.
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