Microsoft 365 is one of the largest and least scrutinised line items in most organisations’ technology budgets. The gap between licences purchased and licences genuinely needed is consistently one of the biggest sources of recoverable software spend.
Opactiv applies the same discipline to SaaS license management that FinOps practitioners apply to cloud infrastructure: connect to the authoritative source of usage data, normalise it into a consistent model, and apply continuous intelligence to surface what is wasted and what is misconfigured.
Opactiv imports a complete picture of your M365 licensing estate directly from Microsoft Graph, covering every dimension that matters for license governance.
User license assignments – every user in the tenancy, the SKUs assigned to them, the service plans enabled, and their recent sign-in activity.
Subscriptions – every SKU the organisation has purchased, with enabled units, consumed units, and warning states so you always know what is unused.
Group-based licensing – Azure AD groups with assigned SKUs, including transitive membership, so group-managed licences are fully visible.
Sign-in activity – individual sign-in audit events over a rolling 30-day window, attributed to users and applications.
Before optimising, you need to understand. Opactiv provides a usage summary view that gives immediate situational awareness across the entire M365 estate:
- Total subscriptions managed
- Total licences purchased and currently assigned
- Unused licences (purchased but unassigned)
- Overall utilisation rate
- Count of inactive users based on configurable thresholds
- Split between group-assigned and directly-assigned licences
The full licence list is queryable by tenant, SKU, user, inactivity threshold, and assignment method, with pagination for estates of any size.
Microsoft 365 pricing is not uniform. Enterprise agreements, educational pricing, and negotiated terms mean that list price rarely matches reality.
Opactiv’s pricing model is built around your actual contract rates. Pricing entries are maintained per SKU, per organisation, with effective dates so historical analysis stays accurate.
Prices can be entered via API or imported in bulk via CSV, and saving estimates always reflect your true per-user monthly cost.
Opactiv runs five distinct categories of M365 license optimization analysis continuously. Each targets a different pattern of waste or misconfiguration.
Identifies licences assigned to users who have not signed in for a configurable number of days (default 90).
Recommendations show the SKU, days since last sign-in, assignment method, and the saving from removing or reassigning the licence.
Monitors the gap between enabled and consumed units for every SKU subscription, flagging large deltas.
Recommendations surface utilisation rates and quantify the monthly and annual saving from right-sizing the subscription.
Analyses sign-in frequency for users on premium tiers (E5 vs E3 vs E1, Business Premium vs Basic).
Low-usage users are flagged for downgrade, with savings calculated using your contracted price differerentials.
Detects users holding overlapping SKUs (for example, both E5 and E3) and flags redundant assignments.
Recommendations specify which licence to keep, which to remove, and the exact monthly saving.
Looks at weekly licence utilisation over the trailing 90 days to detect seasonal demand swings.
- High variance (>50%): pursue flexible or variable licensing terms
- Moderate variance (>30%): plan to renegotiate at renewal
- Low variance: usage is steady; continue monitoring
Each recommendation includes variance stats and the saving from aligning subscription counts with actual demand.
Every M365 licence appears as a resource in Opactiv’s organisational hierarchy, with pool assignment and owner attribution.
Budget limits, anomaly detection, and policy constraints apply to licences just like cloud resources, so SaaS spend is governed in the same workflows.
Analytics, exports, and BI feeds include M365 data in the same currency and enrichment as cloud and AI spend.
Connect multiple Microsoft 365 tenants as distinct cloud accounts but manage them within a single Opactiv organisation.
Filter by tenant when needed while still getting consolidated analytics and recommendations across the estate.
Microsoft 365 is the initial focus, but the same framework extends to additional SaaS platforms as coverage expands.
With Opactiv, every M365 licence has a justified cost, a visible owner, and a continuous check on whether it earns its place in the budget.
