M365 - License Optimization Center

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?

Mastering Office 365 license management can be a challenging feat for many organizations. There are a multitude of factors that need to be considered and hundreds of ways for things to slip through the cracks unnoticed.

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.

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.