Reduce Your Microsoft Licensing Costs In Unprecedented Times
With COVID 19 impacting how businesses run all around the world, it’s important to make strategic decisions to positively impact your business. In many cases, this has resulted in temporary or permanent layoffs. In these times, it’s important to alter your Microsoft Licenses to reflect your current business needs. Fortunately, Microsoft CSP licenses are flexible, and you can reduce unused licenses until those who have been temporarily laid off return.
Remove, Downgrade, or Suspend Office 365 Licenses As Needed Without Losing Your Data
If your business is currently using Office 365 Business Premium or Office 365 E3 and are experiencing temporary layoffs, reducing your licenses can be an excellent way to save money. 360 Visibility recommends temporarily suspending Microsoft Office licenses which includes Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook for users who are currently or permanently laid off.
For those with Business Premium licenses they can be changed to Business Essentials, resulting in a $10 savings per user and will retain all of their data in the cloud. Those on Office 365 E3 plans can be converted to E1 which is a savings of $16/user/month while keeping data intact.
As an extra step, if the only data you care about retaining is user emails, you can convert their mailbox to a Shared Mailbox and then remove the license for that user altogether. This would result in saving the full licensing fee for that user until they return.
Since Office 365 allows you to buy only what you need, 360 Visibility is assisting customers in reducing costs wherever possible. With a consolidated billing model using Microsoft CSP licensing, you would save even more by bundling your Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics or Azure subscription. If you are looking to reduce your Microsoft subscription costs, please reach out to us and one of our experienced consultants will assist you.