Most enterprises anticipate growth, but factors such as a volatile economy, changing market conditions, business expansion, or downsizing can alter that expectation. The fact is that circumstances are bound to change in 36 months, so three years can sound like a long time to commit. That’s why Microsoft offers its clients a Microsoft True-Up.
A True-Up takes place annually and allows a business the opportunity to examine its licenses and make certain they are either adding new licenses or removing underutilized ones to ensure the most business value from software and cloud services.
Since Microsoft requires enterprises to submit their True-Up order between 30 to 60 days before their contract anniversary date, organizations should begin reviewing their Microsoft software, hardware, and online licensing purchases approximately 120 days before that time.
Microsoft advises that each organization ask themselves a series of questions during this review, including whether or not your company:
- Increased user or computer base in the past year
- Made any new acquisitions
- Clustered any servers or increased the number of servers used
- Shifted to/from on-premises licenses to/from online services licenses
- Reserved any online services subscriptions before utilizing them
- Implemented any virtualized server or desktop environments
- Deployed any desktop applications not used previously
- Established warm or hot disaster recovery for any servers
- Put any piloted products or applications into production
The answers to these questions can help a company more accurately determine where and what licensing alterations need to be made.
Additionally, to arrive at an accurate assessment of software licensing and cloud service use, SoftwareONE recommends companies follow best practices throughout the year, including:
- Tracking, managing, and optimizing existing Microsoft licenses
- Watching for underutilized licenses and considering eliminating those subscriptions
- Utilizing Microsoft resources that can help examine changes to an organization and recommend products that might be a better fit