The Role Of Office 365 License Usage Reporting And Analytics When Managing O365 User Licenses

Introduction

When you migrate to Office 365, there in one critical element in managing your Office 365 environment and that is analyzing your Office 365 License usage reports, because if you don’t you will burn your dollars in the Office 365 license plans you have purchased. You need to get insightful Office 365 License reports on how your Office 365 licenses are being put to use.

Remember, if you don’t regularly monitor your Office 365 licenses and their usage, your Office 365 usage costs would not be justified. The size and growth of your users need frequent attention.

Why Office 365 License Usage Analytics is important?

Office 365 Administrators take the approach of either assigning licenses manually for each user as and when the need arises or, they follow an automated approach using third-party tools to assign Office 365 licenses in bulk using rules or conditions that satisfy certain criteria. When licenses are assigned the very first time after Office 365 migration, administrators assign licenses in bulk as a one-time activity based on license estimates and analysis done prior to migration. However, as users get settled into using Office 365 services and applications, the requirement from users, groups and departments begin to change as what was envisaged during migration differs from actual use of licenses when actual business functions start happening through Office 365. Provisioning Office 365 users requires that licenses are assigned based on properly defined procedures. Deprovisioning Office 365 users requires that licenses are freed up and made available for recycling. This is easier said than done. Here is why.

Administrators encounter situations where Users may leave the organization, temporary project teams may require short term licenses, departments that use a chunk of the licenses may not be putting them to use and so on. Without proper insightful reporting on Office 365 License Usage, you will never understand how exactly your users are using the Office 365 services that they have been granted access to. Now this is the crux of the problem. How to determine what licenses are being used and unused? License usage is difficult to track if you don’t have the right reports on how licenses have been assigned, reassigned or unassigned.

How to determine Unused Office 365 licenses?

The most important information an administrator needs is the list of Active and Inactive users by department or groups within the organization. Active users are easy to list based on Office 365 user last logon report say, for the last week or month. A similar list can be prepared about Users who haven’t logged on. Now comes the difficult part. For users who haven’t logged on administrators have no way of finding out if users haven’t logged on due to vacation, business travel, or having left the company. A process-oriented organization will have mechanisms in place to track down such users automatically and administrators will be informed or determine in advance (or at the right time) about users who are not part of the company anymore. Otherwise, administrator must put measures in place where automatic mails are sent to line managers about a user not logging in for an extended time and determining the status of users. A good Office 365 reporting tool will ensure that all such details are captured and presented to the administrators.

Another difficult situation to handle for administrators is when temporary or contract user are brought-in for a certain duration. It is these users who are the most difficult to track down. Such users may leave after sometime or may temporarily shift to another team in the same organization. Groups of these users may not exactly report to the same line managers or superiors. In fact, there are experiences narrated by managers and business heads that temporary users sometimes end up enrolling multiple times in the same company and each time a fresh set of logins and licenses are assigned to them. Tracking down such Office 365 user licenses are the most difficult to deal with no amount of reporting can solve this problem unless a proper process is in place. However a good Office 365 license report must be able to at least make the management aware that such problems need attention and resolution.

The ability to free up unused licenses and make them available for new licensing needs requires a sophisticated Office 365 Reporting and Analytics solutions that covers Office 365 License reports, Office 365 User reports, Office 365 User and Group activity reports (audit reports) and so on within a single framework. Vyapin Microsoft 365 Management Suite is a solution that addresses complex needs of Office 365 administrators.

Office 365 License Management using Vyapin Microsoft 365 Management Suite

Vyapin Microsoft 365 Management Suite provides powerful features for managing licenses in bulk for users and reporting license usage in several different ways. You can assign and remove specific license type or services for users in bulk. For example, you can remove a particular license (service) for a whole department that may not have a need for it. You can reassign these licenses elsewhere. You can assign licenses to a group of users in bulk. Using the Microsoft 365 Reports feature, you can get user last logon reports, you can get a report on the count of each type of license across users, license types and their users, detailed information about Users and their assigned licenses etc. You can also compare your assigned Office 365 licenses with your purchased license count.

Office 365 administrators in organizations that have several hundreds of Office 365 users will find Vyapin Microsoft 365 Management Suite immensely useful to reduce the time and complexities involved in managing licenses in their Office 365 environment.