Introducing Tenant Manager: M365 License Management

We are excited to announce the launch of Tenant Manager, an integral feature for managing Microsoft 365 licenses directly within Turbo360.

For years, Turbo360 has effectively assisted teams in tracking and controlling their Azure expenditures. However, Azure is often just a portion of the overall Microsoft bill. For many organisations, Microsoft 365 licenses constitute a significant expense as well, and managing these can prove challenging due to the sheer number of users, the variety of license types, and the numerous renewal dates that often go unnoticed.

With Tenant Manager, you can centralise your license expenses and gain insights into wasted Microsoft 365 licenses. This tool will guide you on what changes to make and allows you to implement those changes while maintaining a full record, ensuring that no one unexpectedly loses access.

Why Tenant Manager Was Developed

When you ask most teams using Microsoft 365 if they are paying for unused licenses, the typical response is something along the lines of, “probably.” Many have conducted audits to substantiate this, yet the invoices tend to remain unchanged.

The crux of the issue was never pinpointing where the financial waste lay; it revolved around what needed to happen next:

• Determining what to change: A simple sign-in date does not clarify whether a license can be safely removed or if someone using an E5 license could downgrade to E3.
• Making changes without disruption: Licenses assigned via groups cannot be directly removed from a user, and nobody wishes to be the individual who inadvertently disables a senior manager’s mailbox.
• Realising savings on the invoice: Even if a license is removed, the savings aren’t reflected until the subscription count is reduced. With annual NCE subscriptions, changes can only be made within seven days of purchase or at renewal.

Tenant Manager bridges this gap, transforming “we might be wasting money” into “the unnecessary seats are trimmed, and the changes have been documented.”

What Features Are Included in Tenant Manager

Tenant Manager is divided into five key areas, each addressing different aspects of license management.

Overview: Assessing Our Waste

The Overview section categorises every paid seat into three states: active, idle (assigned but unused), and unassigned (purchased but not allocated). You can quickly see the monthly cost associated with each state and the potential savings available.

Below, you’ll find a list of the top ten areas where licenses are underutilised, alongside a Needs Attention feed that highlights urgent issues in straightforward terms: paid seats without any sign-ins for 90 days, license types assigned without allocation, groups lacking an owner, and users who could downgrade to a less expensive license. Additionally, subscriptions nearing renewal are flagged here.

Explore: Understanding the Numbers

The Explore section allows for a deeper dive into the cost figures, revealing the users, groups, and subscriptions responsible for them.

• Users: Filter options include inactive users, accounts with no sign-in history, disabled accounts, guests, and users without MFA. You can view department, job title, and last activity alongside license details.
• Groups: Identify which groups assign licenses, those using dynamic membership, and any groups lacking members or a designated owner.
• Licenses: Comprehensive information on each license type, including purchased, assigned, and unassigned seats, usage rates, and renewal dates. Trial seats are categorised separately to provide clarity, and you can set your own price for each license to ensure figures reflect your actual expenditure.
• Change Tracking: A detailed record of license changes, account lifecycle events, and group modifications, including any changes that did not succeed.

Optimisation: Recommended Changes

The Optimisation section converts your findings into actionable recommendations, with each suggestion accompanied by its rationale.

• Users: Retrieve licenses from disabled, inactive, and users who have never signed in, or suggest downgrading users based on their real usage. There are dedicated filters for idle Copilot licenses and overlapping user licenses, with alerts for licenses assigned through groups, so you can adjust the group settings accordingly.
• Groups: Remove outdated members from groups to prevent licenses from being allocated to individuals who no longer require them.
• Licenses: Discover how many seats can be eliminated from each subscription prior to renewal. This includes both unassigned seats and those ready for reclamation and flags fully utilised licenses, helping you to strategise well in advance.

Alerts: Preventing Costly Issues

The Alerts feature encompasses both license management aspects: waste and continuity. You can be alerted about disabled users with licenses, inactive users holding licenses, potential seat shortages, licenses nearing expiry, and the confidential connection secret Turbo360 uses to access your tenant.

Reports: Sharing Information with Finance

We provide three comprehensive reports covering users, licenses, and costs. The cost report illustrates monthly expenses and unnecessary expenditure per tenant, detailing the origins of each charge.

Built with Safety in Mind

A license management tool that removes access from individuals without prior approval won’t pass security evaluations. Tenant Manager is designed to ensure you maintain control at every step.

Initial read-only access: You can link your tenant to Tenant Manager and view all license waste and recommendations without altering anything in your tenant.

Decisions precede any changes: Each recommendation can be transformed into a task. These tasks may involve adding or removing licenses, adjusting group memberships, or decreasing the seat count for a subscription, and every task requires prior approval before execution. You can process these one by one or in bulk, while any irrelevant recommendations can be disregarded to avoid redundancy.

Every modification is documented: Change tracking captures what was altered, who implemented the change, and whether it was successful. This provides clarity for auditors and security teams, ensuring that unnoticed failures are not overlooked in billing.

Opt-in automation with narrow scope: When your team is prepared, you can schedule regular clean-ups for disabled and inactive accounts. For this, you grant application permissions with admin consent, selecting LicenseAssignment.ReadWrite.All specifically, which allows license management without broader control over user objects.

Target Audience for Tenant Manager

Microsoft 365 licenses are often managed by various teams, which is why Tenant Manager is designed with all relevant teams in mind:

• Microsoft 365 teams: These teams manage the tenant and license budget, receiving clear targets for each renewal and defendable figures for finance.
• Modern workplace and EUC teams: Responsible for implementing services like Teams, Copilot, Intune, and Windows 365, they can assess seat usage and receive alerts before shortages hinder onboarding processes.
• Identity and access teams: They can quickly locate disabled, dormant, and guest accounts that still maintain licenses, in addition to identifying users without MFA and groups missing an owner. One cleaning operation can tackle both cost savings and security risks.
• Network and infrastructure teams: These teams typically oversee security and device management licenses such as Defender, Entra ID P2, and Intune, with Tenant Manager revealing idle license statuses.

For Managed Service Providers (MSPs), tenants can be organised into groups for review from a unified console, enabling regular license assessments across every customer.

Steps to Get Started

You can commence your journey to savings in just a few straightforward steps. The suggested order ensures you achieve the quickest wins first.

1. Attach your tenant in read-only mode: Add your Microsoft 365 tenant to Tenant Manager for syncing without changing anything in your tenant.
2. Define your license prices: In the Explore section, input your actual costs for each license, so that all financial figures reflect your authentic rates rather than list prices.
3. Prioritise addressing disabled accounts and unassigned seats: Licenses assigned to disabled accounts affect no one, while unassigned seats require no user discussions. Convert these suggestions into tasks and approve them.
4. Examine inactive users and oversized plans: Omit service accounts and known exceptions, then tackle reclaim and downgrade suggestions with the relevant reasons presented.
5. Prepare for renewals: Verify license recommendations to see how many seats you can eliminate from each subscription, plus activate alerts to notify you about renewals and seat shortages before they become an issue.

When your team feels ready, activate automation for managing disabled and inactive accounts, and allow the routine clean-up to operate on a timetable.

Tenant Manager is now accessible in Turbo360. Connect your tenant in read-only mode and discover where your Microsoft 365 license expenditure is allocated, or book a demo for a guided walkthrough.