In May we wrote about the Microsoft 365 pricing change taking effect on 1 July and what we were recommending ahead of it. Now that it has landed, this is the follow-up: what to check, and what we would do differently next time.
The mitigation that matters most is not pricing
The organisations that fare best through a change like this are rarely the ones that negotiated hardest. They are the ones that counted their licences properly beforehand.
The categories worth checking are consistent: licences still assigned to people who have left, service accounts holding a full seat they do not need, and staff on a plan a tier above what their role uses. Each one bills monthly, and usually has been for some time.
The cheapest licence is the one you stop paying for because nobody is using it.
What we would do differently next time
- Run the licence reconciliation earlier — a month before renewal is comfortable, a week is not
- Check plan tiers against actual usage rather than job titles
- Treat shared and resource mailboxes explicitly, since they are a common source of over-assignment
- Record the reconciliation date in the documentation so the next one is not a surprise
On commitment terms
The question we get asked most is whether to move to a longer commitment to lock in pricing. Our answer is not about the discount: commit for the seats you are confident you will still need at the end of the term, and keep the variable portion flexible. A saving on seats you no longer use is not a saving.
If you have not reconciled your licence count since before July, that is the exercise worth doing. It usually pays for itself in the first month.