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Free EditionBased in Dubai, The Eclipse Group is a conglomerate of several business units that provides staging services, venue services, laser graphic services, and more for popular live events worldwide. The major challenge in working with several individual business units is that the costs for each one must be maintained individually. This makes capital management a nightmare.
With much of the business world moving towards cloud technology, The Eclipse Group also made a major move by adopting Microsoft 365 as their online work platform. Though working with Microsoft 365 went on without much hassle, they soon realized that the management features it provided were not up to par.
The biggest challenge we have with Microsoft 365 is the license management and billing process. Although we are made of multiple business units, Microsoft only produces a single invoice per license. As you can imagine, this makes it difficult to associate the relevant costs to each of our business units . . . .
- Timothy Ransom, group IT/IS manager at The Eclipse Group, United Arab Emirates
Microsoft 365 only produces one invoice per license, meaning administrators at The Eclipse Group had to split up the total license cost based on the number of users in each business unit. This proved to be an arduous task because the conglomerate has multiple employees in each business unit.
Another issue The Eclipse Group wanted to tackle was their Microsoft 365 spending. The Eclipse Group wanted to audit their Microsoft 365 license usage to find ways to reduce their overall Microsoft 365 spending.
The Eclipse Group needed a solution to divide the Microsoft 365 license costs among its business units based on the number of users in each unit. This task would be much simpler if they could filter their Microsoft 365 users based on business unit so that they could easily split up the cost. They also needed to view their Microsoft 365 usage to decide if they should buy licenses for everyone or if they could tweak their Microsoft 365 plan to reduce the mounting license costs.
We already use a number of other ManageEngine products. We are happy with their entire service offering and support received, and I am confident that I will receive a good product.
- Timothy Ransom, group IT/IS manager at The Eclipse Group, United Arab Emirates
The Eclipse Group was looking for a cost-effective and easy-to-deploy solution with good support from product experts. Having had great past experience with ManageEngine's products, they went to ManageEngine for M365 Manager Plus after rejecting Cogmotive and GingerEX in the process.
M365 Manager Plus can be installed and configured for multiple domains (business units) in a matter of minutes. It provides highly-detailed, dedicated reports for license management. It also provides usage reports for Exchange Online, and OneDrive for Business. These reports list the usage of individual users which can be filtered out based on any attribute (domain, work location, department, etc.).
Users can filter data from reports using advanced filtering options and save each filtered report as a new customized report instead of filtering the data each time. Reports can also be scheduled, exported (PDF, CSV, XLSX, or HTML format), and emailed to administrators.
Using the License Details report, The Eclipse Group was able to filter their Microsoft 365 users based on business unit. After seeing how many users were in each unit, they were able to easily divide their Microsoft 365 licensing costs. As for the plan changes, The Eclipse Group used the usage reports to analyze usage statistics for Microsoft 365 services. With detailed usage statistics in hand, they were able to make license changes that helped them reduce their overall Microsoft 365 spending.
We can now effectively reconcile which licenses we are using in the organization and assign the cost to the business unit. We were also able to identify a number of license changes that could be put in place that reduced our total Microsoft 365 spending.
- Timothy Ransom, group IT/IS manager at The Eclipse Group, United Arab Emirates
