You have heard me talk a lot about remediating differences between configurations in Tenants during migration. With Office 365 being such a large product set, configuration changes can sometimes feel like a total transformation, not just moving data. Although not a configuration, today we will talk about handling license mismatches in a Merger, Acquisition & Divestiture.
Identifying the Problem
As part of your Tenant-To-Tenant analysis investigation, you should review what licenses are assigned, and determine if users have been assigned a different license in the source tenant than in the target tenant. This can simply be done using the get-MSolAccountSku command in PowerShell from both tenants.
Connect-MsolService
Get-MSolAccountSkuHere is the simple output from my dev tenant, which isn’t very exciting, but it’s very simple to read. You will see all your SKUs here including the consumed units.
If you are not familiar with a AccountSkuID you can tie it back to the Office 365 Plan on this site:
Remediation Options
If you are going from a lower tier to a higher tier, you can consider this process complete. You should still look at other license types or add-ons, but you are generally done here. However, if you are reading this, you are likely moving from a higher license plan to a lower plan.
The first place to look in your remediation is to simply look at the License SKU Comparison chart from Microsoft. Look at your source license and compare it to your target license.
Pay attention to the subscripts as they point to the Service Plan for that particular License SKU. This can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/office365/servicedescriptions/office-365-platform-service-description/office-365-plan-options
Let’s dive into the most common issue: Exchange Licensing. E1 licenses come with Exchange Plan 1 while E3 and E5 come with Exchange Plan 2. The main difference for migrations is mailbox size & mailbox archive. However, there are some other important items to note, including DLP. (this will be a future topic for me) Microsoft outlines this important difference here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/exchange/compare-microsoft-exchange-online-plans?rtc=1
The process of comparing the source license to the target license needs to be repeated for all workloads in use, noting all the difference along the way.
Once you have this done, you should do certain reporting to see if you have issues needing attention. For example, if a user has a Mailbox Archive, but the total size between the primary and secondary is less than 50GB, you can migrate the archive data to the primary mailbox and go to the lower level. If the user is enabled for PowerBI, are they using it? You will need to repeat this process across all your users. You will then know who can be downgraded and who may need manual work or an exception in licensing.
Add-On Licenses
In addition to the standard service types, you may run into lower level service plans with some premium features purchased. This is common for organizations that found they could use a lower level, but then needed that one higher level of service. In my experience, the most common combination is lower level license with the Azure Active Directory Premium add-on. This shaves a little bit off the per user price, and for smaller companies, this can be quite important. When doing your license analyses, look for these add-ons.
Additional considerations include looking for other licenses like Microsoft Visio and Microsoft Project.
Other Resources
My colleague Paul Robichaux is going to be doing a webinar next week on How to Prepare for Office 365 Renewal. This is bound to be a great session, but will also give you some great skills that can be re-used in a T2T migration. You can take a look at this free webinar here: https://resources.quadrotech-it.com/webinar/how-to-prepare-for-office-365-license-renewal
License Mismatch
License mismatch can be a significant problem, but like any migration, with proper planning it can be handled correctly. Depending upon the complexity and exceptions to the license policy, license mismatch can either be a very quick or very complex process.
