Microsoft customers currently using Microsoft 365 E3 and plan to upgrade (example, at Agreement renewal) to Microsoft 365 E5 face a potential risk of incompliance or overspending. We give you three examples in this article (there are many more …). Please contact us if you want do discuss.
Overspending
Microsoft 365 E5 offers more features of the same online service compared to Microsoft 365 E3. But it offers also additional products, such as Power BI Pro and Teams Phone. Customers who currently have licensed users for Microsoft 365 E3 and one of those additional products, must not forget to stop the subscriptions for Power BI Pro, Teams Phone (and potential others) when upgrading to Microsoft 365 E5.
Microsoft will not do this for you and there is no automatic (warning) signal that users are licensed double.
Incompliance
Non-compliance or incompliance is not meeting the terms of use which come with your software license. We see an example scenario where customers did upgrade, but at the same time did not take the time to un-assign these (example) PowerBI Pro and Teams Phone licenses from their users. Their thought often is (after not renewing these subscriptions) that these licenses will disappear from the portal (Microsoft 365 Admin Center) and with that the problem is solved. None is less true; assignments stay until the customer unassigns. It means that a user could have a PowerBI Pro license and a Microsoft 365 E5 license assigned to them, and the PowerBI Pro subscription license is missing. This is a non-compliant scenario, despite the fact that use rights to PowerBI are in Microsoft 365 E5. (in short, there are two PowerBI use rights assigned, but there is just óne license).
Tenant level licensing
Last scenario we like to present is when not all user are upgraded from Microsoft 365 E3 to E5, but only a part of the workforce. Microsoft 365 E5 includes Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 (where Plan 1 is included in E3). Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 has security features which are enabled at the tenant level and cannot be turned off for individual users. When these security features are enabled, all users in the tenant must be licensed for Defender for Office 365 Plan 2, or a subscription suite license including Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 (like Microsoft 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5 Security) to stay compliant.
Microsoft 365 Optimize
Knowing all this, the question is if your organization is currently at risk. Asking staff withing the organization, the answer is most likely to be ‘No we are not at risk, all is under control’. But are you sure? The only way to find out is discovery of subscription licenses, assignments, usage and combing this with knowledge. And that is exactly what the Quexcel Microsoft 365 Optimize managed service does. Read more on the Managed SAM page or contact us for more information.