M365 - License Optimization Center

With more employees working remote than ever before, the reliance on collaboration technology such as Office 365 is at an all-time high. Employees no longer have the ability to walk over to their coworker’s desk to ask a quick question or quickly meet with their team to touch base on a project. Fortunately, Office 365 services like Microsoft Teams allow users to efficiently and effectively communicate with each other, making this work from home era that much more manageable.

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

For many of these businesses, 2020 drove a need for rapid progress to enable business continuity during the pandemic. We saw potentially years of transformation in mere months, or even weeks. During this time, we certainly were not thinking 'is the cost of licensing worth it?'

Welcome to Part Four of Addressing the Office 365 Monitoring Gaps. In this post we will cover how organizations can fill the Office 365 monitoring gap and improve their end-users' experience with Office 365.

The Microsoft ecosystem is a complex beast and requires detailed analysis and understanding for any business to establish their core suite of tools and licensing requirements. There are many applications for staff to use across their working day, along with the platform configuration, with a key decision being what to enable for staff.

Since the dawn of time (if the dawn of time was in 2011), assigning Office 365 licenses has been a pain. It has never been complicated, but it has also never been a pleasant experience.

In Part 1 of this two part series, I made the argument that IT should not own Microsoft 365 and that, in reality, it should be the organization as a whole that owns the service and determines how it works.

It may come as a surprise to you that 69% of companies reported over-spending on their cloud budget by 25% or more in a recent survey by Lead Market. Given the complexities of Office 365 license management, it’s understandable why so many organizations are overspending. With so many options, it often feels like you need a PhD to figure out where the savings are.

Cloud services like Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 are continuing to grow at rapid rates. Microsoft’s overall revenue in FY20 Q2 was $36.9 billion which means 14% growth compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year. The Office 365 portion growth was 27% (up 30% in constant currency).

On October 23rd, Microsoft announced – a little out of the blue – they were going to introduce self-service purchase options for users on November 19th. The details of this change were put forward in a post in the message center, article MC193609 to be exact. In short, this option would introduce several changes for commercial tenants.