Licensing Parts of M365 F5 Compliance Separately

• Customers can buy parts of Microsoft’s regulatory and legal compliance services for their frontline workers.

Microsoft 365 F3 and F1 users can now be licensed to benefit from Microsoft 365 E5-level audit, eDiscovery, Information Protection, and other compliance-related features on a more granular basis than was possible in the past. The F3 and F1 frontline suites (sometimes also referred to as firstline) offer value licensing for organizations to cover their deskless workers. New add-on licenses for those suites could represent a cost savings opportunity for customers wishing to deploy limited collections of E5-level compliance features.

New F5 Compliance Components

Customers who mix Microsoft 365 F3 and F1 users with Microsoft 365 E5 users in the same tenancy generally must supplement F3 and F1 users with special add-on licenses to adhere to Microsoft licensing rules. This is because in most cases customers cannot prevent F3 and F1 users from benefiting from E5-level regulatory and legal compliance features (and in addition E5-level security features) since Microsoft’s platform lacks both built-in license enforcement mechanisms and practical tools and methods for customers to restrict feature scope to properly licensed users.