Most organizations are shifting to Office 365 subscriptions from their traditional licensing models. With attractive offers and additional functionality this seems a logical and cost-effective decision but without effective management subscriptions can be a costly way of purchasing software. To avoid the pitfalls a new method of software asset management is required in order to minimise risks and maximise opportunities.
All subscriptions whether it be for software, magazines, information or other services face the same basic risk, if you don’t use the services then you are locked into continually paying for what is in effect a waste of money. The answer is simple “pay for what you use and use what you are paying for”, but to do this you have be able to measure what is used and what is not used before you can take the decisions to improve your cost efficiency.
In choosing a method to measure usage efficiency you need to be able to identify each user and when and what elements of Office 365 they are using. This gives you the granularity to be able to make specific decisions about improving the services and costs. In addition, your reporting should identify the potential cost savings and enable you to rank them so that you focus on the most important first. Generally, 20% of the causes will deliver 80% of the savings.
Key factors for cost efficiencies:
• Make sure you have a fast way to identify lapsed users. People are leaving and joining organizations, so you need to cancel subscriptions and add new ones. If you don’t cancel the “leavers” quickly then you will be wasting subscriptions.
• Some users will not be using key facilities that their job requires them to use because they are using other services rather than those in Office365 e.g. they could be using Skype for business but instead use an alternative service that is being paid for. In such cases it makes sense to cancel the duplicate service and take measures to move to the Office 365 facility.
• User may be unable to use certain Office 365 facilities because they have either not been trained or the service has not been provisioned. In such cases an action plan to remedy the situation can be developed for implementation and the users will become more effective in their daily work.
• In some cases, users may simply be on the wrong level of subscription. They may be only sporadic users of Office 365 and will never use all the facilities of the more advanced subscriptions. In such cases it is worth considering downgrading their subscription.
A regular review of organizations by their value-added software supplier will help generate new strategies and plans for getting the best from an Office 365 implementation. The new License Control for Office 365 service from TBSC provides customers with the usage tracking and analysis to maximise the efficiency of Office 365. It is cloud based and quick and easy to set up. Efficiency reporting is detailed and highly graphical with in depth analysis to individual user level. For further details contact the TBSC sales team at: [email protected] or visit https://tbsc.cloud
Click here for more information on our License Control for Office 365 and get access to some downloadable content!
