But
It was only complicated because MS made it complicated.
Office 365 administrators have a reason to be happy: Microsoft has finally joined the party on group-based Office 365 licence management, saving time from manual maintenance, or the reliance on scripts and third-party systems. The 'before' time Until earlier this year, administrators of Office 365 had no pure native way to …
My employers solution is to a) license basic office for every PC and b) never buy new licenses for the more expensive stuff regardless of staffing levels.
Each PC has Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook. Then, each week, the office admins mail around begging anyone who isn't actively using their Visio/Project/etc.. licenses to return them for someone else to use.
It's quite efficient.
The easiest way out of ALL of this is to use software that doesn't require licenses to work.
LibreOffice is your friend.
No my dear boy, they are not selling 'shit' as you so aptly put it.
They are renting it to you.
Failure to pay the rent and you lose access to your documents. This is especially true if you for some strange reason store them in the likes of OneDrive and other MS cloudly offerings.
I look forward to the day when a large company gets into deep do-do because the Purchasing manager went 'How much? You gotta be kidding..." when faced with the next MS bill and the CEO happened to be off playing Golf on MS's dime and couldn't agree the purchase order.
"because HR decided to enact an end-of-week tidy-up to the CEO's Office 365 account."
Please don't disturb the Friday night binge drinking just because an HR droid put their career on Self-Destruct. Drinking and driving don't mix, you know. That can wait until post-blackout Saturday mid-morning.
The worst user experience I've personally had outside of a certain application software company's products from the mid nineties.
Bug ugly flat GUI interface with lousy color schemes. Makes my eyes water after a couple of hours wrestling with it.
Makes sharing documents with non-users a terrific pain in the fundament with it's "lets encode everything and require people to go to a website to get a key so they can read whatever it is" methodology.
Hogs bandwidth that isn't there.
And (All Together Now) requires a persistent internet connection.
All that, and the mail client can't provide a fraction of the features I get with thunderbird, which in turn means I cannot properly automate to deal with idiots who hijack mail threads without changing subject lines and therefore miss "important" things people write in the bewildering expectation that I will read their e-dribble in real-time.