Simple Administrators guide to working with licensing data in O365 Admin Portal

Many times we've come across customers with no handle on license management costs implications, maybe you find yourself in the same boat, as an administrator, someone working on the IT team or you're paying the bills and can't understand why costs just keep going up! You just know that when change happens... sometimes... things fall through the cracks. Below is a simple method we use to identify a disabled user account that is still costing you money. In almost every instance we save the company we are working with money on licensing and increased security postures when the results of how you do here lead to other areas of the business where the same rules could apply.

If you or your company needs support feel free to reach out on the contact us form and we'll be happy to help.

When working with Small to Medium to Large companies we almost ALWAYS recommend a CSP partner that will allow you to flex and scale your Office 365 licensing. So no long-term commitment on minimum license commitments. This flexibility, if well managed, can mean that IT per-user cost rises and falls on-demand as users come and go.

O365 License Management - Finding Disabled users with licensed accounts

Most companies are fairly good at disabling accounts when users leave the company, sometimes however the task of removing the associated O365 license is neglected. Here is a quick simple no-risk way to find disabled users that might still be running an Office 365 license.

If you have to correct rights to view users via the O365 Admin portal - Open and login to your O365 Admin portal via portal.office.com or directly https://admin.microsoft.com/ click on users => Active Users and click the ellipsis ...

to access "Export Users" dependent on the size of the organization you support you might need to wait while this CSV file downloads.

Once downloaded, open this file in Excel.

Click Data => Filter (to enable filters on the headings).

Now we need to apply 2x simple filters.

First Filter:

Select the filter on the “BlockCredential” column (column B by default) and UNTICK “false” to ONLY show True (so users that accounts are marked as disabled).

Second Filter:

Select the filter on the “Licenses” column (column M by default) and UNTICK “Blanks” to ONLY show accounts are marked as disabled that have some O365 license assigned.

DONE!

Have a look at this filtered list and see if there are any users that might need their license removed.

Note - the list that you end up with will MOST LIKELY ALSO contain licensed service or resource accounts if you use it in this way - but even in a large organisation, taking the time to do this on a regular basis might just mean that you catch users that slipped through the cracks.

CarbonVector can assist you with strengthening your onboarding, potential changes during the employee lifecycle as well as the leaver process. We can also complete a full audit to see what other operational and cost efficiencies you are able to make all on an hour by hour consultancy basis.

Feel free to contact us for more.

Happy hunting.

The CarbonVector Team.