M365 - License Optimization Center

The Microsoft 365 platform is a complex beast, and managing it sets many challenges for the IT team or department in an organization.

From the 1st of March this year, there will be price increases across all levels of Microsoft 365 licensing from Business Basic through to E5.

Microsoft recently announced changes to their commercial pricing for Microsoft 365 — the first “substantive pricing update” since launching Office 365 a decade ago.

It is that time a year, and planning and budgeting season for next fiscal year is upon us! Trust us, we cannot believe it either. Right about now many of us are coming off personal holidays and are carving out time on our calendars to start the process. One planning area in particular that can be a challenge for many organizations is Microsoft 365 license management. In the hopes of helping you navigate this hot topic, there are a few important factors you need to keep in mind that will hopefully make 2022 a successful and profitable year for your organization!

Microsoft Office 365 provides numerous ways to substantially boost productivity while considerably lowering hardware and software costs for enterprises. However, according to Gartner, many organizations are wasting enormous amounts of their budget investments on unused licenses.

New to Office 365? Or maybe you just cleaned up your environment and you’re looking to keep it that way?

If you’re coming up on your EA, you might be scrambling to accurately forecast your Office 365 licensing needs.

Unfortunately, with E3s, F1s, add-ons, and more, it can be tricky business to accurately determine your licensing needs without the proper Office 365 license management solution in place.

Not to worry, all hope is not lost! There are 5 things you can do to make forecasting your Office 365 license needs that much easier.

"We've seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security - we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything."  -  Satya Nadella, CEO – Microsoft

Many businesses have been existing within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem for years on its ever-changing journey and ongoing transformation.

Welcome to part four of Addressing the Office 365 Monitoring Gaps. In part 1, Michael Van Horenbeeck discussed the differences in monitoring cloud-based systems vs traditional on-premises deployments. In part 2, we discussed admins least favorite thing, outages. Part 3 was all about the native tools available to admins.