Microsoft 365 license governance

Your Microsoft 365 tenant.
Finally under control.

Portalliz gives multinational IT teams worldwide what your tenant has been missing: license allocation by country, quota enforcement, and governance workflows — on top of your existing tenant. No migration. No replacement. Just control.

No credit card. No commitment. Available for Microsoft 365 tenants.

Read-only Graph accessEU-hostedSetup in under 15 minutes

Trusted by IT teams managing Microsoft 365 at scale

20–30%

Average license budget recovered in 90 days

€8.80/user

Saved per user on E5 + Power BI Pro redundancy alone

+10%

Average inactive licenses in an unmanaged multinational tenant

€312K+

Average annual waste detected in tenants with 5,000+ licenses

1 tenant

Managed as many. Controlled by country.

Why this problem still exists in 2026

Microsoft 365 is built for global scale. Regional control is a different problem — and it requires a different tool.

Microsoft 365 is designed for global scale and efficiency. Allocating licenses fairly across countries, subsidiaries, and cost centers requires a governance layer that doesn't exist natively — and that gap costs more than most IT teams have measured.

01

One pool. No borders. No accountability.

Your tenant shows 6,800 available licenses. Region A requests 10 more E1s — already gone. Another region consumed them last week. No alert. No process. No way to know until someone complains. Microsoft 365 was designed for global scale — regional accountability requires a different layer.

02

Your process exists. Not everyone follows it.

An admin in a remote subsidiary opens Microsoft 365 Admin Center and assigns a license directly. No approval. No reservation. No record in your system. By the time you notice, your quota is off, your costs are wrong, and your monthly report is fiction. This happens every week in every multinational tenant.

03

You're paying twice. Nothing in your Admin Center flags this automatically.

Microsoft 365 E5 already includes Power BI Pro. Assign both to the same user and you pay €8.80/user/month for nothing. At 50 users that's €5,280/year in one combination alone. These redundancies exist across dozens of SKU combinations. No native tool in Microsoft 365 flags these redundancies automatically.

€8.80 × 50 users = €5,280/year — just in this one combination.
Real friction. Every week.

This conversation happens in every multinational IT team.

No names. No company. Just the reality of managing licenses without regional control.

Without Portalliz
B
Admin B·15:04
Hey, did you already order the licenses for our region? I was told they were included in this cycle.
A
Admin A·15:07
Yes, they should have been reserved for us last month. Let me check quickly.
B
Admin B·15:16
Probably consumed by another region. Licenses will be available this afternoon. If you can, assign them as soon as they're available — I'll send you a message when it's done.
A
Admin A·15:17
Thanks. Again.
B
Admin B·15:18
I know. It's always like this.
Manual coordinationNo regional reservationLicenses consumed by others unnoticed
With Portalliz
Region A · M365 E1OK
Reserved
80
Assigned
72
Available
8
Batch #4 · Region AApproved ✓
10 × M365 E1
Requested by: Regional Admin
Quota protected. Other regions cannot consume reserved licenses.
Reserved before the cycle opensOther regions blocked from consumingNo coordination needed

This is not a hypothetical. This happens every week in multinational tenants without regional governance.

How Portalliz works

Governance without friction

Most governance tools add complexity. Portalliz removes it. Three steps from connection to full visibility — no professional services required, no Microsoft consultant needed.

1

Connect your tenant

One Microsoft Graph read-only consent. Portalliz syncs your SKUs, users, and assignments. Nothing is written without your approval.

2

Define your structure

Set license quotas by country or subsidiary. Add emergency buffers. Define your monthly request cycle.

3

Govern in real time

Country admins request. Global IT approves. Out-of-band assignments are flagged. Inconsistencies surface with estimated waste.

CORE CAPABILITIES

Features — Portalliz

QUOTAS

License quotas by country & region

Enforce license allocation limits per country and region. Block over-assignment before it reaches Microsoft, with full audit trail.

WORKFLOW

Reservation workflow

Batch license requests, approve in one click, sync to Microsoft 365 automatically.

AUDIT

Compliance & inconsistency audit

Detect license changes made directly in the Microsoft admin center. Flag for review, notify stakeholders, and regularize through the portal — no automatic reversals without human approval.

SAVINGS

License optimization

Identify unused and oversized licenses. Save 15–40% on Microsoft 365 spend within the first quarter.

Built for IT teams who manage Microsoft 365 globally

Portalliz wasn't built in a startup incubator. It started at 11pm, with one IT leader who decided to fix a problem nobody else would — and became a team that knew how to build the answer.

Data sovereignty by design

Your data stays where you put it. Self-hosted, EU-hosted, or deployed in your region. GDPR, LGPD, and local compliance ready.

Read-only by default

Portalliz never modifies your tenant without explicit approval.

Built by IT, for IT — and that changes everything

Only those who live this every day understand how complex it is to manage without a proper governance layer.

THE STORY BEHIND PORTALLIZ
In 1995, at 19 years old, I built a system in FoxPro that nobody asked for — because the pain was visible and that was permission enough. Thirty years later, after a career managing Microsoft 365 across multinational environments, I did it again. Portalliz is what happens when the people who feel the problem decide to fix it.
Michel Martins de Araujo · Founder, Portalliz · Stuttgart, Germany · michelmart.life
ROI Calculator

How much is your tenant
leaking right now?

Adjust the sliders to match your organization. The numbers are conservative estimates based on real multinational tenants.

Your organization
500
5 countries
€22
Recommended tier
Portalliz Business
599/month
7,188/year
Estimated annual waste
Inactive user licenses (~10%)€13.2K/yr
Redundant SKUs (E5 + Power BI Pro etc.)€7.9K/yr
Out-of-band untracked assignments (~5%)€6.6K/yr
Wrong tier for actual usage (~8%)€3.2K/yr
Total waste€30.9K/yr
Net savings
€0
after Portalliz cost
ROI
330%
return on investment
Payback period
Portalliz pays for itself in
3
months
These are conservative estimates. Actual savings depend on your tenant's configuration.
Want to see exactly what Portalliz finds in your tenant?
90-day free pilot · No credit card · No commitment
Common questions

We've heard every objection. Here are the honest answers.

If you're asking these questions, you're the right person for Portalliz.

  • Microsoft 365 gives you a global pool of licenses and a global Admin Center to manage them. What it doesn't give you is the concept of regional allocation — the ability to say 'Germany gets 120 E5 licenses and China gets 80 E1s, and neither can touch the other's pool.'

    The native tools operate entirely at tenant level. There are no country quotas, no reservation cycles, no approval workflows, and no detection of assignments made outside your process.

    This isn't a gap that Microsoft overlooked. A single global pool with no friction maximizes license consumption — which aligns with their commercial model, not yours.

  • PowerShell and Power BI give you visibility — a snapshot of what happened. Portalliz gives you governance — a structure that shapes what happens next.

    Scripts tell you that Germany consumed 12 more licenses than expected last month. Portalliz prevents it from happening in the first place by reserving Germany's allocation before the cycle opens.

    The other problem with scripts: they require someone to run them, interpret them, and act on them. That person is usually you — at 11pm, in a Teams thread, manually reconciling a spreadsheet. Portalliz runs continuously and flags issues automatically, with an audit trail that doesn't depend on anyone remembering to check.

  • Four categories of tools exist in this space — and none of them solve the same problem as Portalliz.

    Reporting tools (ManageEngine M365 Manager Plus) are the most widely used. They give you 14+ pre-configured reports — licensed users, inactive licenses, expiring licenses, bulk assignment. Excellent visibility into what happened. No concept of what should happen next. No reservation cycle, no regional quota, no out-of-band detection. A sophisticated dashboard without a steering wheel.

    SaaS Management Platforms (Zylo, Torii, Productiv) manage your entire SaaS stack across all vendors. Powerful, expensive, and built for organizations with dozens of SaaS tools to govern. They identify unused licenses and recommend reclamation. No regional quota concept within a single tenant.

    Identity and lifecycle platforms (Cayosoft) have license quota concepts — but built around Active Directory Administrative Units, not countries or subsidiaries. Full hybrid identity management suites covering AD, Entra ID, and M365 together. Complex to deploy, custom enterprise pricing, built for dedicated IT teams. You buy a plane when you need a car.

    Optimization tools (CloudFuze, CloudNuro) identify waste after it happened and recommend downgrades. Reactive, not preventive.

    The pattern across all of them is the same: they tell you what happened. Portalliz governs what happens next — with regional quotas, monthly reservation cycles, approval workflows, and automatic drift detection.

    It's the only tool built specifically for regional license governance within a single multinational tenant. And the only one you can install and configure in under 15 minutes without a consultant or a custom quote.

  • Portalliz connects to your Microsoft 365 tenant via Microsoft Graph API with three specific read-only permissions:

    — /subscribedSkus: which license SKUs your tenant has purchased and how many — /users: the list of users and their assigned licenses — /users/{id}/licenseDetails: per-user license details

    That's it. Portalliz cannot read email, calendar, Teams messages, files, SharePoint content, security data, or any personal communication. It cannot modify your tenant — assign licenses, remove users, change configurations — without an explicit action by an authorized administrator inside the portal.

    The full permissions list is documented at portalliz.com/docs/permissions. No surprises.

  • This is the most common situation we hear — and it's exactly why we built the ROI Calculator and the Business Case document.

    The IT Director understands the problem technically. Finance needs a number. Management needs a risk profile and a payback period.

    The Business Case at portalliz.com/business-case is a single page designed to be forwarded to a CFO without explanation. It shows the waste in euros, the cost of Portalliz, the net savings, and the payback in months — for your specific organization size.

    The average payback period at Business tier is under 3 months. The average IT Director who presents this to Finance gets approval in the same meeting.

    Download the Business Case →
  • If you're on the SaaS plan: your data is exportable as CSV at any time from the Analytics section. After cancellation, your data is retained for 30 days and then permanently deleted. We will notify you 14 days before deletion with a final export reminder.

    If you're self-hosted: your data lives entirely in your own SQLite database on your own infrastructure. Cancelling your Portalliz license doesn't affect your data in any way — it remains yours, readable with any SQLite-compatible tool.

    No lock-in. No hostage data.

  • Portalliz processes Microsoft 365 tenant metadata — user display names, UPNs, license SKU names, and assignment records. It does not process email content, personal files, or sensitive personal data beyond what is necessary for license governance.

    For EU customers on the SaaS plan: all data is stored on Microsoft Azure infrastructure in the West Europe region (Amsterdam). No data leaves the EEA.

    For self-hosted customers: data never leaves your own infrastructure. You control the server, the database, and the backup.

    A Data Processing Agreement (DPA) is available on request for customers who require it for compliance purposes. Contact legal@portalliz.com.

From the blog

Field notes on Microsoft 365 license governance

Practical writing for IT Managers running multinational tenants.

May 20268 min readBy Michel Martins de Araujo

Why Microsoft 365 Has No Regional License Quotas — And What It's Costing You

Microsoft 365's global pool is by design, not by accident. The architecture problem, the four costs it creates, and what regional governance actually looks like.

Microsoft 365License governanceMultinational IT
Read article
Pricing

Simple, transparent pricing

Per-tenant pricing. No per-seat surprises. Cancel anytime.

Starter

Ideal for mid-sized companies with 1–3 subsidiaries.

€299/month
  • 1 tenant
  • Up to 3 countries
  • Up to 1,000 managed licenses
  • Monthly cycle, quotas, inconsistency engine
  • Graph sync (read-only)
  • Email support
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Business

Built for any multinational with a single tenant and regional accountability — from Europe to the Americas to Asia.

€599/month
  • 1 tenant
  • Up to 10 countries
  • Up to 5,000 managed licenses
  • Everything in Starter
  • Advanced analytics & full audit trail
  • Out-of-band enforcement
  • Priority support
Request Early Access

Enterprise

For industrial groups and holdings with multiple legal entities.

€1,200+/month · custom
  • Unlimited countries & licenses
  • Multi-tenant (multi-subsidiary groups)
  • Self-hosted option
  • Dedicated SLA
  • Assisted onboarding
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Founding pricing

First 10 customers lock in 40% off — for life.

Not just year one. Permanent founding discount on any tier, as a thank-you for shaping Portalliz with us.

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