ManageEngine rolls out Office 365 License Management and Reporting

The Office 365 management portal fails administrators on several fronts. For instance, the portal can't manage more than 20 user licenses at a time. It can't import users from a CSV file and bulk-edit their licenses. Moreover, it doesn't collect and report information necessary to optimise Office 365 resource management in a Windows Azure Active Directory environment. In turn, admins rely heavily on PowerShell to perform tasks like modifying a large number of Office 365 licenses and to query Azure AD tenants. PowerShell, however, is a command line tool that is time consuming and hard to use.

“After we added Office 365 provisioning and reporting capabilities to ADManager Plus, our customers started asking for a bulk license management utility that would offer some flexibility in managing Office 365 licenses,” said Manikandan Thangaraj, director of product management, ManageEngine. "So we not only added that utility in ADManager Plus, we also upgraded ExchangeReporter Plus to report on Office 365 mailboxes. This way, administrators need not struggle with PowerShell to get mailbox statistics that ease license management.”

Flexible Office 365 License Management in ADManager Plus
The Office 365 bulk license manager in ADManager Plus makes managing Office 365 user licenses more flexible and easy. The user interface lists all the Office 365 accounts, making it easy for administrators to select and modify the licenses of several accounts at a time. Depending on their needs, administrators can choose to add, replace, or revoke licenses completely or selectively.

CSV-based bulk licensing - Administrators can import a user list from a CSV file to manage the licenses of a specific group. This provision helps when administrators need to change subscription plans for a department or revoke licenses of inactive users.

Customised, selective licensing - This feature enables administrators to revisit assigned licenses and enable/disable services based on user requirements. Given the design of the interface and user selection options, administrators will find it easy to bulk-enable services

The new ADManager Plus module also enables administrators to delegate Office 365 license management and reporting to help desk technicians for a certain location or OU.

Insightful Office 365 Mailbox Statistics in ExchangeReporter Plus
The new Office 365 reporting module in ExchangeReporter Plus offers information such as inactive mailboxes and top 10 mailboxes by size, which are not easily available on Office 365 management portal and can only be obtained by using elaborate PowerShell scripting. In addition to saving administrators the scripting effort, these reports equip them with a clear idea of how the Office 365 resources are being utilised. The new Office 365 module of ExchangeReporter Plus offers the following reports:
Mailbox Enabled Users reports list all Office 365 users who’ve been assigned Exchange online licenses and mailboxes.

Mailbox Size reports specify the size of individual mailboxes and the number of messages stored in them. They also identify the top 10 mailboxes in a tenant based on their sizes.

Inactive Mailboxes reports identify mailboxes that have not been accessed for a long time. For every inactive mailbox listed, the report points out the last logon time.
Archived Mailboxes reports provide general information about mailboxes that have been archived.