200,000 subscriptions were recently surveyed by TBSC. Research analysis revealed that 100% of these Microsoft Office 365 users say they want to manage their cost of subscriptions.

In choosing a method to measure usage efficiency you need to be able to identify each user and when and what elements of Microsoft 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.

Benefits:

• Fast and always available
• Agentless
• Pay-as-you-go

Features:

• Complete license overview
• Subscription optimisation
• Automatic downgrade calculation
• Subscription re-harvesting calculation

Outcome:

• Complete license overview, which gives a single, detailed view of all Microsoft Office 365 app usage and subscriptions.

Smarter 365 enables you to recognise and manage the key factors for cost efficiencies. These factors include: lapsed users, not using apps allocated to users, users not trained on using apps, or users being on the wrong subscription.

Smarter 365 gives you a fast way to identify lapsed users. People are leaving and joining organisations, so you need to cancel subscriptions and add new ones. If you don’t cancel the “leavers” quickly then you will be wasting subscriptions.

Likewise, 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 Microsoft Office 365 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 Microsoft Office 365 facility. Smarter 365 will provide you with this data.

User may be unable to use certain Microsoft 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 this case, Smarter 365 will provide this data and Microsoft can provide the training.

In some cases, users may simply be on the wrong level of subscription. They may be only sporadic users of Microsoft Office 365 and will never use all the facilities of the more advanced subscriptions. In such cases it is worth considering downgrading their subscription. Smarter 365 will identify these users and offer recommendations.