Microsoft 365 is used by almost all the companies we encounter - yet few know exactly how individual licences differ or whether they are paying for features they never use. The following overview is deliberately practical: without marketing names for functions nobody uses, and with emphasis on what actually pays off for businesses. The aim is not to offer a universal recommendation, but to show what to ask about and where unnecessary costs most often arise.
Overview of Business Series Licenses
- Business Basic - e-mail (Exchange), Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint, Office applications only in web and mobile versions, without installation on the computer. Suitable for employees who work mainly in a browser or on a mobile device.
- Business Standard - includes everything from Basic plus full desktop applications Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook installed on the computer. Typical choice for most office roles.
- Business Premium - includes everything from the previous levels plus tools for device security and management (Intune, Defender, conditional access). It is cost-effective where a company needs to centrally manage and protect corporate laptops and mobiles - setting policies, remotely wiping lost devices or enforcing disk encryption.
Individual licence prices change over time, so we provide them only as an indication and recommend verifying the current price list directly with Microsoft or a CSP partner - the price difference between Basic and Premium is typically in the hundreds of Kč per user per month.
What companies pay unnecessarily
During licence audits we repeatedly encounter the same patterns of waste:
- Active licences of former employees. The account is neither cancelled nor transferred after an employee leaves, so the company continues to pay for a full licence for an unused account.
- Premium where Standard suffices. If a company does not centrally manage its devices or enforce security policies, the expensive Premium features remain unused.
- Coexistence of an in-house email server and Microsoft 365. Sometimes a company pays for both solutions even though it actually uses only one of them.
- Unused supplementary applications for cloud administrationwhich the company activated once but no one has actually configured or uses.
Free shared email accounts
A useful and often overlooked feature: shared mailboxes (such as info@ or obchod@) do not require a separate paid license up to a defined storage capacity - they can simply be linked to existing licensed users who have access to them. Many companies mistakenly purchase a full licence for these mailboxes, even though it is unnecessary. Similarly, distribution groups for mass communication and so-called resource mailboxes for booking meeting rooms or company vehicles also work free of charge - they too can be set up without an additional licence, provided they remain within reasonable storage capacity.
When the Business series is no longer sufficient
Business series licences are designed for small and medium-sized enterprises and have a limited maximum user capacity. A growing company that exceeds this limit or requires more advanced tools for identity management, compliance and reporting usually migrates to Enterprise series licences. It makes sense to address the migration in advance, not only when purchasing an additional Business licence can no longer be completed.
Security essentials included in the price
Even without the most expensive licence, a company has access to basic security tools that are often not fully utilised. Multi-factor authentication can be enabled for all licences and should be standard practice regardless of whether the company owns Premium. Similarly, basic rules for data retention and deletion (retention policies) are not restricted to the highest tier. Before a company opts for a more expensive licence for security reasons, it is worth verifying what is already active but unused within the current tariff.
How to configure your license correctly
The most effective approach is a regular audit - reviewing the licence list once every year or two to verify who actually uses them and what level they truly require. A mix of licences across the company (some employees on Basic, some on Standard, IT administrators and sensitive roles on Premium) usually costs less than a single licence for everyone. As a Microsoft CSP Partner, we carry out this audit as part of regular IT management and recommend an optimal mix based on actual usage, not default settings.