Optimized License Management
Optimized license management for your customer tenants is a complicated process. There are many ways that licenses can remain in place when they should be returned to the available inventory. The following subsections show you how to create customized views that will help you improve your license management for Microsoft 365.
Evaluating License Inventory by Department
To create a report showing M365 licenses assigned to different departments you can follow these steps. In your default ‘Users’ data view, add the ‘Department’ column and then drag that column to the top of sapio365 grid as shown in the screenshot below.
Do the same for the ‘Assigned Licenses’ field, and you now have a data view of every department’s users – including their licenses. And you can take this even further and filter or group by any available user property.
Once you have the information you’re looking for, you can export the results to a file using these steps. Go to the ‘Global’ tab in the ribbon and click on the ‘Export to File…’ button.
Recoverable Licenses for Cost Savings
Using sapio365, you can easily create a comprehensive list of all the users along with the type of license assigned to their account. And you can group that listing by other important categories to determine if their license can be recovered and reassigned, namely their login status. If their account is blocked or they haven’t logged into M365 in over 60-days you should probably remove their license.
The two different data views you can create will help you determine these license recovery options. Please follow the steps outlined below to generate these reports and identify if there are licenses that you can harvest.
Part 1: Finding blocked user accounts with Licenses Assigned
The first report will show those user accounts that have assigned licenses but are blocked from signing in. These are deactivated M365 users who did not have their licenses removed for some reason.
The important fields you need to include inside your data view are ‘Sign-in Status’ and ‘Effective Assigned Licenses’. As you can see from the example below, there are two blocked accounts with an E5 license assigned that we can recover.
To clean up the report you should also remove the accounts that don’t have licenses assigned. You can easily filter those out by going into the ‘Sort/Filter’ tab in the ribbon and choose. Right-click on the column called ‘Effective Assigned Licenses’ and then click on the ‘Filters by Text’ option. Type in the value of ‘—Unlicensed –’ for the Text is not equal to value and then click on the Apply button. Notice that all the records with accounts that are unlicensed are now hidden in your data view.
To make modifications to the assigned licenses you can right-click on the user account entries and then choose the ‘View Licenses’ option. From the new window you can select the license entries and use the ‘Edit Licenses' button to make changes from the licensing control window as shown below.
Part 2: Finding inactive users with Licenses Assigned
The second activity is to find user accounts who have licenses assigned but have not signed in over 60-days.
Starting with the previous data view you need to filter out all the blocked user accounts and only focus on the ones with ‘Allowed’ status. Now add the date field to your view called ‘Last signed in on’ so we can create a filter for those entries.
To filter out all the entries that are past our last sign-in cutoff date of 60-days you can right click on the ‘Last signed in on’ column and choose the ‘Cutoff Date/Time Filters’ option. Then enter the number 60 to the ‘Hide the last’ days filter section. Then click ‘Apply’ and it will show you all the users with licenses who haven’t been active in over 2-months.
You can now act on the user accounts and make any necessary updates from the data view.
