How do you handle canceling software seats when someone leaves?

Sounds like you need to make a comprehensive off-boarding process. This should probably include a checklist of all your SaaS platforms and any licenses/seats that you need to manage for a user.

How long do you leave the shared mailbox around for? Internally we're divided on the make the accounts into shared mailboxes front. Clutter vs Ease of use.

Software licenses, as with everything else in your environment should be tracked within a CMDB with regular reporting (automated or otherwise) so you don’t lose visibility. At larger organizations, it’s often a big part of someone’s job just to manage licenses for the various platforms and applications for exactly this reason. (At my current employer, we actually have a small team just to deal with licensing and negotiations and auditing - but we are operating at a global scale) At smaller organizations it is sometimes a shared responsibility with IT & HR and a review of licenses in use should be performed routinely as part of employee off-boarding (which should be as automated as possible - especially at small shops). tl;dr - yes you’re probably disorganized - but you wouldn’t be the only one.

Most solutions come with mature reporting functionalities. There is a in-house developed tool that handles most of the AD stuff. There is also a llicense management departmanet that handles all things licensing.

If you have a significant enough number of these then a dedicated SaaSops tool such as Bettercloud can be a godsend.

I guess the first question would be – how do you keep track of your software licensing? The second would be do you have a documented process for off boarding staff? Does HR have anything? I typically leave my 365 users active for a couple of months, to make sure I have all of their data backed up. Then I convert their account to a shared mailbox.

It's called offboarding. it's just like onboarding but in reverse.

Automatic permission removals when people have been marked as leavers by HR.

As the guy paying the bills, I do this either at renewal time, or as part of the monthly invoice reconciliation. We are a relatively small shop, so I’m the one that checks the invoices are accurate, and as part of that check, will also confirm license counts are still correct

It’s generally part of my offboarding process. But for clients I offer a service where I audit their spend and generate a report of all of their subscriptions, renewals and opportunities for savings.

Our HelpDesk has an offboarding process. We *don't* use it (I'm **REALLY** fighting to get an actual hiring / offboarding process off the ground; we just have so many other priorities with our primary business software in the middle of a changeover we just don't have the bandwidth to address it). BUT, it does provide the ability to set tasks for it. If tasks aren't completed, the ticket can't be closed. We would, theoretically, set software such as that to be removed as part of that ticket tasks.

Just reminded me how difficult it was to downgrade our Zoom licences for some reason.

This is just market research. You posted this in different subs today and don’t respond.

Once we started on the SOC 2 journey, I realized that a lot of our processes needed improvement, including both our onboarding and offboarding processes. The end result is that we have templates used for onboarding and offboarding that include items/tasks such as this: adding/removing licensing when applicable. Given that we have to upload these documents to Drata, we work pretty hard to avoid it falling through the cracks.

An ITAM system tracking license assignments that fits your budget. An employee off boarding workflow which uses it in some way. Automation and manual work has to go hand in hand with this sort of thing. Not every licensing portal or unassignment is worth being automated. Security group managed licenses where you can. Reconcile licenses on a regular basis. Track usage where and how you can. Get the people approving spend to coordinate better with IT to help head-off the shadow IT you're paying for and don't know about, which is a valid concern for departing employees as it is for active ones.

Whenever possible software licensing is assigned by security groups. When a user is term'd they are pulled from almost every group with the one that handles office 365 licensing pulled two days after term to allow an out of office to be put up after. We have audit tasks in our ticketing system that have us look to clean up licenses in some products based on use(atlassian comes to mind) where we don't license it for everyone.

Get standard onboarding and offboarding checklists, and do regular audits. It’s not the managed licenses that I find is the issue. It’s the shadow IT licenses. But that’s an accounting and HR problem because they’re letting people with company cards purchase random internet based software.

We automate EVERYTHING from our ERP/HRO. Account creation, license application/removal, email distribution add/remove, etc. These are literally just checkbox in the User’s profile. We have very few automations within the HR suite. We have a master “full revocation” checkbox that disables all accounts and removes all licenses. Outside of that, only reports. For example, a terminated employee can have a e-mail account or a zoom account. The ERP sends notifications on regular intervals on these exceptions. Access requests go to HR. IT is never involved.

If possible, use floating licenses that aren't tied to a person. It's super easy to look at an RLM server and be like "We have 10 licenses for XYZ, but only 9 employees..." And, yell at your vendors who don't offer classic floating licenses as much as possible. When it's vendor-specific, user-specific subscriptions, you inevitably have to do some leg work to aggregate non standard stuff and keep track of things. The honest answer is that it usually winds up being a dumb spreadsheet. Sigh.

Can't you add it to your existing offboarding checklist, assuming you got one already. Else you should start with one. ;-) We have standardized checklists for onboarding/role change/offboarding and add those to tickets in our servicedesk platform.

Small office of under 20 people. Dupe the last spreadsheet, edit out the variable data, name it for the person leaving and fill it out. Columns for what thing, who will take care of it, by what date, who does take care of it, and date done.

Sso as much as you can so you can remove access and then our offboarding sheet has a list of our top 15 saas licenses. We end up with extra if they eliminate a position though, just have to sit on them till there’s a new hire.