Questions about migrating from Office E3 and E1 licenses, to Business Basic and Business Standard?

[OneTechBeyond]

We are downsizing to Microsoft Business licensing, as opposed to Enterprise license, which we were previously issued through an MS Partner (we will be self-managing now)

A few questions about the process of transitioning our licensing:

• We have evaluated our requirements, and the legal retention requirements aren’t needed so apart from some of the storage capacity and the compliance features, are M365 Business Basic and M365 Business Standard equivalent to Office 365 E1 and Office 365 E3?

• I’m preparing to purchase the new licenses under our own corporate credit card as the payment method as opposed to being charging our MS Partner who we’re moving away from, but I have a question about how the Microsoft tenant will behave as I purchase and swap out the current licenses with the new ones. Does anything get triggered at the partner side, when we purchase the new licenses that might impact the user base, or do the newly purchased Microsoft Business licenses just sit ‘dormant’ until I start applying them to user accounts, so that they replace the Enterprise licenses?

• Most importantly can I ‘phase in’ applying our newly purchased M365 Business licenses gradually, or do all licenses need to be swapped out at the same time, potentially introducing issues that we weren’t aware of?

My concern is that as soon as I purchase licenses under our corporate card that the Partner assigned user licenses will suddenly get rescinded or put on hold, potentially impacting business continuity. Any help you can offer is appreciated.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

The basic services are equivalent, you should be able to easily verify that by looking at the ServicePlan value. Make sure to swap the license in a single operation though, to avoid downtime. It's not necessary to do this for all users in the same time, you can use a phased approach.
It should not affect the partner-purchased licenses in any way, but just in case you might want to ring them. Worst case scenario, you end up with the 30days grace period :)

[#3]

Nice clear and succinct response!

Thanks!