Compliance Guidance Offered, but Deeply Flawed

A recently published document, called “Microsoft 365 Tenant-Level Services Licensing Guidance,” attempts to provide prescriptive guidance for how customers can gate use of features unique to Office 365 E5 and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) E5. The guide suffers from serious shortcomings, including the following:

• The document omits any discussion of certain especially problematic E5-level-only features, such as Azure Active Directory’s Access Reviews feature, offering no recognition or advice for how to handle license compliance for these features
• The document points readers to other online documentation for guidance, but the referenced pages fail to address the issue, provide at best a partial solution, or make proposals that most customers would deem operationally impractical or overly burdensome
• The document claims that Microsoft intends to develop tools to help the company detect and measure license noncompliance resulting from features (such as Azure Advanced Threat Protection)