For most businesses, Microsoft Office is simply the cost of doing business. But here is the thing many practices have not clocked: Microsoft is not just the Office suite any more. Increasingly it is your cloud directory too, through Active Directory synced to the cloud, or Entra ID as the main directory of your staff accounts. It is the system that says who your people are, what they can reach, and what happens when they leave.
If you are not using AD or Entra ID, your network is unlikely to be at proper standards. And a dental practice is, by definition, a business in a regulated healthcare profession, where standards, compliance and privacy are supposed to matter. So this is not a stationery decision. It is infrastructure, and it is the same reason we called Microsoft the filing cabinet and security control room of a modern practice.
The tenner that makes me sigh
Which brings me to the conversation I have more often than I would like. A practice tells me they do not want to pay the tenner a month it costs to give an associate a full standard licence, let alone the premium one. And yes, in dentistry this is standard fare.
What practices typically want instead is to share a single licence between people. That breaks Microsoft's licence terms, plainly. But honestly, the licensing breach is the smaller problem. Sharing a licence means sharing a login, and sharing a login means a dramatic reduction in security and accountability: shared passwords, no record of who did what, no way to cut off a leaver cleanly. We wrote a whole piece on why shared accounts quietly cost you, and licence-sharing is how many of them start.
The other regulars: people presenting us with grey or frankly dodgy licences bought online for twenty quid and asking us to set them up. Or the copy of Office 2013 on a CD, with its bit of paper, from ten years ago, offered up for installation on a brand-new machine. We understand the instinct. It is still the wrong call.
The perspective worth borrowing
I am grateful to Thomas Norlin at Marlow Dental Centre, one of our customers, who put it better than I ever have: "It's a sorry day when my associate writing treatment plans and estimates for patients can't justify the tenner a month it costs so they can write up the plan."
Thank you, Thomas. I wish everyone thought with that perspective. Set against what an associate produces in a session, ten pounds a month for the tools they write treatment plans with is not a cost worth agonising over. It is a rounding error with compliance benefits.
But nobody likes waste: optimise, do not share
Now, the honest other half. Nobody likes waste, and it genuinely matters that you optimise your licence usage, so you do not spend more than you need and each user has the right type of licence for their role.
Because here is what many practices miss: not everyone needs the full desktop Office suite. Plenty of staff only ever need the online versions of Word and Excel, plus OneDrive and SharePoint. For them, Microsoft 365 Business Basic does the job for the princely sum of about a fiver a month per person. Just a bluey. No big deal at all.
So the sensible sites mix and match. The heftier, most fully featured licences go to the senior users who genuinely need them: desktop apps, the security tooling, the works. The cheaper licences go to staff who live in a browser. Everyone gets their own identity, their own login, their own accountability, and the total bill is often lower than people fear, sometimes lower than what they were spending on a mess of mismatched licences before.
And to be clear about where we stand: if a practice really wants to share licences, we will not stop them. It is not our job to police anyone's compliance. But we will always recommend against it, in writing, because we have seen where it leads.
New: a weekly licence usage report
One more thing, recently out. We can now provide a weekly report detailing your Microsoft licence usage: what you are paying for, what is actually being used, and where the mismatches are. Licences have a habit of drifting, a leaver here, a duplicate there, an unused premium seat quietly billing away, and a weekly view keeps the estate honest without anyone having to remember to check.
Getting it right
The destination is straightforward: every member of staff with their own identity in Entra ID, the right tier of licence for their role, nothing shared, nothing grey, nothing on a CD from 2013, and a regular report so the spend never drifts. Modern, compliant, safe and licence-efficient, all at once.
If you would like a chat about how to do this properly at your practice, including whether your current licences are the right ones and what the weekly usage report would show you, get in touch. We will tell you plainly what you need, what you do not, and what it will actually cost. Usually less than the guilt of the shared password is worth.