Understanding the Licenses tab within CloudRadial

The licensing tab can be found under the Usage area of the feature set (Usage > Licenses).

How does CloudRadial obtain the license information?

This tab is always present, but it only automatically populates when an Office 365 tenant has been connected to a specific company. The information pulled into this tab is pulled directly from Office 365's license tracking services.

Selecting a given license will further drill down into its details, which currently includes:

• The number of used licenses
• The number of available licenses
• The SKU name
• The SKU ID
• The current user(s) allocated to that license
• A chart of historical license allocation

Note: Only O365 users synced to CloudRadial will be listed under the license details

How often is this data refreshed?

The information listed within this report is updated once per day at a minimum when the nightly sync happens with Office 365 tenants. The information can be manually pushed if a Partner syncs the tenant against their tenant data between these automated sync cycles. 

Suspended Licenses

If there are suspended licenses in the 365 tenant, that amount is displayed in the portal under the Used column after the '/'. 

Unreported Users

If there are users holding a license that aren't users in the CloudRadial portal, this is represented by the red asterisk seen above.

Troubleshooting license attributions

CloudRadial will not be able to attribute licenses to users that are not imported. Users that are not present in the portal (whether by exclusion, Office-side disabling, or any other reason) will not be attributed to the licenses.

Therefore, it's possible to have a "legitimate" mismatch in the number of allocated licenses. 

Adding licenses manually

You can add different licenses manually into a given tenant and attribute them to specific people within the company. The process is as follows:

1. Navigate to a given company's Usage > Licenses area
2. Select the +Add button at the top right
3. Fill out the license details as prompted
4. Select Submit to finalize the creation of the license

Once the license has been created, you must assign the license to specific users. To do so:

1. Navigate to Usage > Users
2. Select the 3 blue-dot menu and select Edit by a user that needs to have the license attributed to them
3. Select the Licenses tab
4. Drag the appropriate license(s) over to the left-hand column
5. Select Submit to finalize the attribution

How should partners be using this information?

Licenses can be used in several different ways. 

1. You can use licenses at face value as a part of the business review conversation. Making the process of reviewing licenses on a regular basis can be an excellent and proactive cost-saving maneuver that keeps you on top of your client data while setting the expectation that the audits are a shared responsibility.
   
   
2. You can use the Office 365 licenses in tandem with their linked compliance policy that highlights unallocated licenses. This further automates the process to ensure that client organizations are only paying for what they're using.
   
   
3. You can use the licenses as a means to enforce compliance. Depending on the nature of your clients and their respective governing compliance requirements, you may need to have certain licenses in place that meet their needs. This can assist in identifying and remediating against risks associated with using the wrong types of Office 365 (or manually added) licenses that put the client at risk of being non-compliant with their relevant regulations.