Microsoft requires additional licenses for Planner and To Do when auditing

[German]Microsoft has just made public a change that could affect users of Microsoft 365. Whoever evaluates audit events for Planner, Project and To Do in Purview Premium Auditing, needs appropriate (additional licenses). I stumbled across this issue by chance on Twitter.

What is Purview Audit Premium Auditing?

Microsoft Purview Audit (Premium) is the Audit functionality in Microsoft Purview. This provides organizations with visibility into many types of monitored activity across various Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft Purview Audit (Premium) helps organizations conduct forensic and compliance investigations by increasing the retention of monitoring logs required to conduct an investigation.

The audit feature provides access to key events (using the monitoring log search in the Microsoft Purview Compliance Portal and the Office 365 Management Activity API),. This helps determine the scope of the exposure and faster access to Office 365 Management Activity API. More details can be found in the linked article.

Attention: Licenses are required!

II already came across the following tweet, in in which someone points out a pitfall: Microsoft requires additional licenses for auditing services like Planner and To Do.

Microsoft arguably announced on June 16, 2023 (occurred Message Center as notification MC590113, Microsoft 365-Roadmap-Element 124916) that audit events for Planner, Project, and To Do will be available in the Purview compliance policy, but only if tenants have Microsoft Purview Auditing (Premium) licenses (included in Office 365 E5 and Microsoft 365 E5). Tony Redmond, in his blog post Microsoft Demands Additional Licenses for Planner and To Do Auditing, classifies this as an attempt by Microsoft to generate additional revenue from its Microsoft 365 user base.

Tony Redmond writes that he has no problem with Microsoft mandating premium licenses for audit events generated by Project- Because this is not a primary use for many tenants. But both Planner and To Do its general purpose applications that are widely used, just like all other workloads that generate audit events at no additional cost, like Azure AD, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams and so on. No idea if anyone in the readership is tangentially affected – if needed, you can read details in Tony Redmond's article.