Outlook 365

Business users may be underestimating the number of Microsoft 365-related licenses they need without realizing it. In some cases, they may need to buy "extra" licenses in order not to run afoul of licensing rules. That's according to the independent Microsoft-watching firm Directions on Microsoft (DOM) in Kirkland, Wash.

DOM CEO and Research Chair Rob Horwitz outlined three ways that Microsoft 365 customers may be under-licensing themselves during a "Microsoft 365 Hidden Licensing Costs" webinar on October 24. 

Edge

Microsoft 365 is Microsoft's subscription bundle of Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5; Office 365; and Enterprise Mobility + Security. It encompasses the Office client applications; Office server applications; collaboration and productivity tools like Teams, MyAnalytics, Stream Video; PowerApps and Flow; compliance tools; and infrastructure components such as Azure Active Directory; Azure Information Protection and more.

"Moving to Microsoft's cloud doesn't eliminate compliance worries. It enforces them," Horwitz told attendees.

Horwitz said there are three primary reasons organizations may require more Microsoft 365 licenses than anticipated. They may need more to stay compliant; to augment suites with additional capabilities that are not included with any Microsoft 365 suite; and/or to have enough licenses to cover their dev/test provisioning requirements.

In some cases, customers may be mixing the Microsoft 365 subscription levels and suite levels within their tenancies. That means that customers with a less expensive F1 (first-line worker) or E3 suite license could potentially have access to some of the higher-end features that are only part of Microsoft 365 E5.

With some features, such as Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, for example, enablement within a tenancy means customers legally need to license the feature for every user in the tenancy. And because license compliance tooling isn't necessarily built-in -- or even available for every feature-- customers may not realize certain users are not in compliance, he noted.

DOM says some users could benefit by avoiding mixing levels in a tennacy by licensing Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 for all users in that tenancy. One potential way to do this is to set up separate F1, E3, and E5 tenancies, though this can result in higher costs and complexities, as DOM warns in a recent report. (Subscription required to view.) Customers also should try to use higher-level features sparingly and/or negotiate prices for freestanding licenses up-front

One Note

Office 365 Groups Get New Automatic Renewals Policy

Microsoft changed group expiration controls for Office 365 so that groups now automatically renew with user activity, according to a Monday announcement.

With the new policy, now at the "general availability" commercial-release state, groups will get automatically renewed if certain user activity has occurred before a group's expiration date. These activities might include members of a group uploading a SharePoint document, sending an e-mail to the group via Outlook or visiting a Microsoft Teams channel, according to the announcement.

The new policy slightly alters the current Office 365 groups expiration policy that was established last year within the Azure Active Directory Admin Center portal. Essentially, organizations set a time for Office 365 groups to expire. If "group owners" (typically certain end users) don't renew their groups before this expiration deadline, then they'll get sent a series of e-mail reminders at 30 days, 15 days and one day before end. If there's no response, though, the group gets automatically "soft deleted" but it can still be restored within 30 days' time. After that 30-day period, though, the group gets permanently deleted. Microsoft's new policy stops the group's expiration based on user actions.

The new policy applies to organizations that have set up Office 365 group policies via the Azure AD Admin Center portal or Azure AD PowerShell. It works across various Office 365 applications, such as the groups used for "Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer and others."

One catch for organizations is that the ability to set expiration policies for Office 365 groups depends on having an Azure AD Premium subscription for all group members. Here's how this Microsoft document expressed the point:

Configuring and using the expiration policy for Office 365 groups requires you to possess but not necessarily assign Azure AD Premium licenses for the members of all groups to which the expiration policy is applied.

Right now, it's just possible to set one expiration policy for "all Office 365 groups in an Azure AD organization," according to Microsoft's document.

The types of user actions that have the effect of automatically renewing Office 365 groups with the new policy are described in the following list:

This list of actions likely will get updated at some point, though, Microsoft indicated.

Microsoft came up with the new Office 365 groups expiration policy in response to user feedback. The policy change aims to "strike a balance between cleaning up unused groups and ensuring any valuable groups do not get deleted unintentionally, causing data loss," the announcement explained.