The basis of any license compliance review is to understand your organization’s full License Entitlement Position (often referred to as the Bill of Materials), after all, how do you determine compliance without knowing what you are entitled to?

We review any and all available forms of entitlement such as the Microsoft Licensing Statement (MLS), the Enterprise Agreement contract details, Customer Price Sheet (CPS), explore.ms exports and invoices in order to provide a full entitlement baseline, including any notable contractual clauses, potential gaps and non-standard provisions.

This goes hand in hand with the entitlement reconciliation; a review of what has been deployed and is in use within your estate. ITAA utilizes a tool agnostic data collection approach, mirroring the methodologies used by auditors during formal Microsoft audits or the ‘lighter touch’ Microsoft Baseline reviews.

Along with the empirical data collection are a number of workshops/interviews with key application owners to fully understand the environment. This allows us to gather the appropriate amount of non-discoverable (or non-instance) information which, with the discovery data gathered from any available toolset, allows us to determine the license requirements of the estate.

Combining the entitlement reconciliation and deployment analysis results in the Effective License Position (ELP), a point in time snapshot of your Microsoft software license compliance position with a clear explanation of the applicable license metrics, calculations and potential ambiguities. In addition to the base report will be an outline of any potential optimisation opportunities and/or risk remediation activities.

The Microsoft ELP is key to your understanding of your environment and can be used as a baseline for your renewals, new deployment projects, migrations or simply to be aware of your compliance position in the event of a formal audit.