Lets set the scene…
A couple of years back you spent a long time building the business case to purchase Microsoft E5 to your IT and Finance Director. You decided you were going to do this properly and start off by building a PowerPoint presentation outlining the benefits of going for the “Hero” license, it includes everything you are ever going to need from Microsoft. It is a little bit pricey compared to what you had been using before, but you are confident that there is enough functionality that comes with Microsoft E5 that you will actually end up saving money.
Your PowerPoint goes into detail about the potential savings from not needing 3rd party products to cover antivirus on endpoints, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and information protection. You can also let them know about all the enhanced security that would be delivered by Entra ID Plan 2 to protect your users’ identities while also being able to collaborate securely with external “Guest” users. Your build process can be completely scrapped because you can adopt Autopilot with Intune policies freeing up the IT team to do some more strategic work. Everything is going to plan with your presentation, you are feeling confident that when the bosses see this they wont be able to say no, your case is so compelling that you will get the go ahead, a pat on the back for your efforts and a drink at the Christmas party for actually saving the company 1,000’s.
The time comes and you are nervous, you can see that by adopting Microsoft E5 that you will save money but more importantly you will save the IT department a lot of wasted time and effort and that the department can become far more productive.
You run through your presentation, they aren’t quite convinced at first, but they are open to the idea, you haven’t been thrown out of the meeting room which is one of the scenarios that went through your head when pulling this together.
A few days go by, you finally get called in to see your IT Director. They liked your presentation, you are told that if the license can provide everything you say it does and we can get rid of various 3rd party products that cost 1,000’s, some of which have renewals due soon, then you can go ahead and purchase Microsoft E5 and start to plan the rollout.
You are over the moon, you are straight on to your Cloud Solution Provider and let them know you will be starting the adoption of Microsoft 365 E5. They are happy, you are happy and everybody wins!
Present Day
You have been using your shiny Microsoft 365 E5 licenses for a few years now. On visiting user groups and community events it becomes clear that you have actually adopted way more features of E5 then anybody else you have spoken to. The problem with having Microsoft 365 E5 licenses is that a lot of the feature set remains as shelfware, features never get deployed for one reason or another. You might not have the in house knowledge on how to deploy a feature properly, you may not even know that you have certain functionality. For various reasons a lot of E5 never gets deployed.
However, a lot of the features you have deployed have saved the IT department a load of time and effort such as using Autopilot with Intune configurations. The old build process is gone and now you can deploy a new PC to a user with very little time or effort required. You know the device is encrypted, protected by Defender for Endpoint as Plan 2 comes as part of E5 and using the PC Backup feature of OneDrive you know that your user data is safe and that is just the endpoint device taken care of. Your data has nice shiny labels that can be applied to prevent the files being used without authorisation, even if they are stolen. You have DLP watching what users are attempting to send out of the business and preventing it going should it breach company policy. You know that only the users and devices that you say can access your 365 environment can gain access thanks to Conditional Access and you also know that the guests that you allow to access your environment are limited to the areas you say they can get to and are required to MFA. Alongside the above is also the fact that you have saved 1,000’s on the 3rd party licenses you used to buy and the IT department is far more productive.
As it stands the Microsoft 365 E5 investment has been a success!
The times they are a-changin’…
You have been to a few user groups recently and there is a theme, add on licenses…
When you did your research in to E5 it was the “All you can eat” offering. Pretty much everything you would ever need to run an enterprise IT department is there in the box.
March 2023 Microsoft announced the availability of the “Intune Suite” license. This was the first time that Intune had offered add ons. This includes additional features that would light up and be available in the Intune portal when you have purchased the license. Now Intune has been broken up in to “Plan” offerings in the same way as Entra ID (Azure AD). The Intune we know and love that is part of Microsoft 365 Business Premium, E3 and E5, and is now referred to as Intune Plan 1, however there are two new offerings, Intune Plan 2 and Intune Suite. At the point of release the additional paid functionality is:
- Endpoint Privilege Management
- Advanced Endpoint Analytics
- Remote Help
- Microsoft Tunnel for Mobile Application Management
- Intune Management and Protection of Specialty Devices
There are also other licenses that can be purchased on top of Microsoft 365 E5 such as Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management to give additional functionality and visibility in to what is going on in your environment from a security perspective.
Taking the additional Intune features for now, some of which are available to purchase as a stand-alone feature such as Remote Help, the current price point of the Intune Suite will put some people off as at the moment there is limited value given the cost. However, there are some great new features being added to Intune suite in the near future and the features that have already been released are still being developed and improved. The Intune Suite may not displace what you already have to fill the gaps at the moment but it will be a compelling argument in the not too distant future.
Conclusion
So as the image at the top of the post may suggest, there will come a time where you need to dust off the PowerPoint and make another case to purchase “some more” Microsoft licensing when your business case not that long ago had you rave about the benefits of the E5 license and that it contained everything you would ever need. If the Microsoft Sales machine have realised that they have left something on the table in terms of licensing be prepared to keep your PowerPoint deck close to hand…