Take control of your M365 and Teams licensing with Clobba

Can you, hand on heart, say that you have complete visibility of the consumption of all M365 Licences in your business? How much are you spending each month or, to put it another way, how much are you wasting? Are all of your purchased licences relevant and in use or are there users with duplicate licences? Or do you have very little visibility on this level of analysis and the impact of your provisioning policy?

Our CEO, Mark Armstrong, talks about the Clobba LA interface, how to quickly and simply display licence consumption and costs, analyse the data to highlight duplication, overspend and most importantly, how you can save money and reallocate already purchased licences without having to leave the site.

Why should organisations manage their Microsoft licences?

Mark: Clobba LA was developed off the back of our current customers’ requests, who are frustrated with the archaic process, but also a general market requirement for a more efficient way of managing licences.

I would say there’s two business drivers that we’ve established through conversations with our customers, who very kindly assisted us in developing this solution:

Cost savings
User adoption

Cost management is the biggest driver, or the biggest frustration so the true-up of licences and that kind of management visibility is essential and where cost savings will genuinely be made.

Unsurprisingly, user adoption is the second one. An organization will of course invest in teams and Microsoft 365 licenses with the intention to achieve those associated business benefits. If the users are underutilizing the licences it might not just be a case of “right let’s change your tools” or cancel the licence. It may be a case where that visibility is really going to drive education and training to the end users, so you are maximizing the opportunity with the allocated licences.

What are the key areas to monitor?

Mark: Looking into our beta tester’s environment, we’ve identified four key areas that need addressed with licences:

Inactive user with licence – where a licence is allocated to a user, but no login has occurred. Naturally, the user can define the period that can pass between logins.
Underutilized licences – For example, a user has an E5 licence assigned, but they’re using only some of the services in it. This might be an opportunity to downgrade to a more cost effective and relevant licence.
Duplicate licences – when a user within the organization has multiple licences and they’ve got overlapping services. With careful monitoring, an informed decision can be made wether to unassign or disable them.
Disabled with licence – when a user has been disabled in AD but still has a licence.

So we made sure that Clobba LA gives visibility and actionable insights into these areas that organizations can actually use.

Who can access the data from within the organisations?

Mark: Delegated and role-based access applies here, as for the rest of the Clobba modules. It can be used by employees without an administrative role, with permissions ranging based on the levels of accessibility the organization has defined for each of them. If you compare this approach to what’s natively available in the Teams Admin Portal, you realize it’s a more secure method, and it implies less training is needed.

Can organisations customize dashboards to suit their needs?

Mark: Absolutely. Up to the tiniest detail.

We even did a poll with our customers, to choose between light mode and dark mode. 60% preferred dark mode, so we made them both available from day 1.

You can start dashboards off from a blank canvas and simply drag and drop relevant widgets, resize them and create their preferred layout. More importantly, you can then go into each widget to rename it, select a timeframe, and start filtering and grouping the data. Because they’re dynamic, you can select or deselect the elements as many times as you need.

Let’s say you want to see licence costs by country. In your selected widget, you only have to group data by country and hit save. Then, when you mouse over it you can also see individual costs for each country. And for a detailed view, you can click through on the region you want to monitor to see a breakdown of costs per department, licence type and even further for each employee’s licence and adoption details. On the metric side as well, you can filter by the product you’re monitoring for, such as Business Premium licences, or for Copilot.

All dashboard layouts can be saved either as personal or public dashboards and shared with other users within the organization.

What level of information can Clobba LA retrieve for individual users?

Mark: If you’re looking at the actual users, you can see an overview of their organization attributes, the licences that are assigned to them, assigned user tags and the endpoints that are associated with them. An important feature here, you can select, deselect or effectively enable disabled licences directly from this user panel.

You also have insights into individual users’ OneDrive and mailbox usage and sign-ins to common M365 applications plus the OS they used to sign in from.

This is not a micromanagement solution; it won’t show you what’s happening inside those apps or a timestamp for sign-ins. Its role is to help managers understand if employees are on the right licences, to see if they need more training to increase user adoption.

Adding the user list to the platform is simple, you just have to import the users from AD. That can either be as a scheduled import that’s going to run overnight, or we can do an ad hoc import at any time.

Could you give us an overview of the licence page?

Mark: To start, you can import the licences into the platform, same as you would do with users.

The page will list all the licences within your organization. You can see if they’re enabled, if they apply to users or to the organization, the consumed units as well as the associated costs. You can of course, select the one you’re interested in to see a breakdown of the associated services, give it an alias and most importantly, change the cost figure to accurately represent the price you’ve negotiated for each licence type.

So how do we get the reports for effective licence management?

Mark: In the analysis rules dashboard is where you can define the rules and effectively run reports off the back of those rules themselves. Here you can select and enable one or more rules, choose role criteria, define the timeframe and run the report.

After the analysis rules are set up, you can move on to the Analysis dashboard where you’ll see the recommended actions column for each of the different rules that have been applied. These insights can be actioned straight from this page, either in bulk or by filtering based on a specific criterion.

Can organisations trial Clobba LA or is this a purchase-only solution?

Mark: Every Clobba module has a trial period. Organisations can access a 14-day free trial for Clobba LA to see for themselves what cost-saving potential they have. Anyone interested can reach out via our website, an account manager, or a partner to ask for a quote or a demo. The solution is typically delivered from our Cloud, so the installation is simple and intuitive. It’s a matter of minutes.

Knowing this information, do you still believe managing M365 licenses should be done manually?

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Take control of your M365 and Teams licensing with Clobba

Why should organisations manage their Microsoft licences?

What are the key areas to monitor?

Who can access the data from within the organisations?

Can organisations customize dashboards to suit their needs?

What level of information can Clobba LA retrieve for individual users?

Could you give us an overview of the licence page?

So how do we get the reports for effective licence management?

Can organisations trial Clobba LA or is this a purchase-only solution?

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