Licensing Shared Mailbox with Defender for Office 365 plans

Question

Hello,

I'm wondering what is the best practice in terms of assigment to licence Shared Mailboxes and M365 groups with defender for O365 licences plan. Indeed, when we look at the KB Microsoft Defender for Office 365 service description - Service Descriptions | Microsoft Learn,

I quote the MS article, we must acquire licences with Defender for Office 365 for all the following ressources :

• Any user that accesses a mailbox that benefits from Defender for Office 365 protections.
• Shared mailboxes that benefit from Defender for Office 365 protections.
• If Safe Attachments protection for SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, or Teams is turned on, all users that access SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, or Teams.
• Any user that uses Microsoft 365 Apps or Teams when Safe Links protections are enabled.

For the first one, I understand. Ok, the assignment is quite simple.

For the others, let's assume i understand, however technically, we cannot assign the license since there is a dependancy with Exchange Online Plan. This last plan is not a prerequesite for Shared Mailboxes, M365 groups or apps/users that don't have a mailbox. So we cannot assign them.

Do we just have to buy the license and not assign them ? If that's the case, how should we follow how much licence are missing ? By developping customed scripts to count how much we must buy or how much we still have ?

Kind regards,

Thomas S.

Answer 1

Hi @Thomas Santorelli ,

For most Microsoft products licenses are required for any user who benefits from the service, and you just need to make sure that you have enough licenses to cover all of the users who need them.

That said, I would recommend reaching out to your licensing representative of choice for more clarity. It's free to speak with someone from the Billing or Sales team.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/

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Answer 2

Hi Marilee,

Thank you for your feedback.
I'm not wondering what we should buy, the rules that are pretty clear in the KB, but how we should use them in M365 tenant

According to the usage rules, we must license the users and the shared mailboxes. (Not only the users that are benefiting the service)

We technically cannot assign the license to the second since there is no Exchange Online Plan.
How should we do that in that case ?

Kind regards,

Thomas S.