v8.2 ENow Management System Release Notes

Save Time, Money, and Get Better Control of Your Microsoft 365 Environment with ENow Version 8.2

Managing your Microsoft 365 environment is no small task and it’s getting more complex each day. Microsoft is like a bullet train, continuously rolling out new features, licensing options, and platforms like Power Apps and Copilot. We know the struggle: keeping costs down, ensuring proper governance, and cutting through administrative complexity. That’s why we’re excited to announce Version 8.2 of the ENow platform, designed to help IT teams and their organizations stay ahead of the curve.

This incremental ENow Version 8.2 release is packed with enhancements to address the challenges IT teams face every day in managing Microsoft 365 environments. Let’s dive into what’s new and how it makes your life easier.

Taking Control: Enhanced Governance Features

We know IT teams are often in the dark about how tools like Power Apps, Copilot and Teams are being used. The explosion of low-code/no-code development tools like Power Apps means innovation is at an all-time high—but governance challenges are growing, too. Without visibility, it’s nearly impossible to maintain control while fostering innovation and encouraging adoption.

With new governance reports for Power Apps and Teams, you’ll gain:

Visibility into Power Apps: See what’s being created, launched, and published—along with permissions—so you can manage the rise of citizen development responsibly.

Implement new Power App reports (20507).

In this release, we are happy to deliver 5 new Power Apps reports focused on providing details on the Power App audit log events such as Power Apps Activity, Power Apps created, Power Apps launched, Power Apps published, and Power Apps permissions.

Better Teams Governance: Understand usage patterns, ensuring your collaboration environment stays compliant and secure.

Implement new Microsoft Teams Governance reports (20449).

This release includes an enhanced All Microsoft Teams report dashboard and new All Microsoft Teams Channels report dashboard. In addition, there are 3 new reports that will be focused on each of the different types of Microsoft Teams Channels which are Standard, Private, and Shared. These new additions to the Microsoft Teams Governance reports pack will provide Teams channel details to assist administrators when verifying memberships, adjusting sharing options, modifying guest members that are permitted to participate, and managing many other channel-related activities and settings. The addition of these reports will help Microsoft Teams administrators properly govern team-wide communication efforts, the sharing of information, and the option to maintain communication to a private set of team members.

Copilot Adoption Tracking

Copilot is a hot topic, and its expensive licenses mean IT needs to be strategic about allocation. Our True Adoption Score and Copilot Readiness Score helps you:

• Assess user readiness for Copilot licenses.
• Decide who needs Copilot licenses most based on real usage patterns.
• Empower your organization with customizable user personas and adoption scoring tailored to what matters to your business needs – going beyond the one-size-fits all approach of built-in Microsoft tools.

Unlike built-in Microsoft tools, we give you the flexibility to customize these insights for your organization’s unique needs.

Introducing ENow True Adoption Score and Copilot Readiness Score (18570).

These new features provide a more accurate way to score Microsoft 365 adoption for your organization. The ENow True Adoption Score is calculated using a complete data set from Microsoft 365 services. The results of the calculations lead to meaningful insights related to how well your users are adopting Microsoft 365 workloads and features. Eliminate all confusion by using a simplified approach to enabling only the metrics that matter to your specific departments within your organization. You have complete control to set the pattern of ENow True Adoption Score.

Create your own User Personas and define which activities and workload engagement matter the most. See which Apps are being used the most and score the way that reflects your organization’s priorities and expectations.

Is your organization ready for Copilot? This tool is positioned by Microsoft to be a game changer for organizations that want to achieve more, but like any innovative technology, its effectiveness depends on your users and their adoption and tech proficiency. The ENow Copilot Readiness Score will take the guesswork out of exploring and preparing a readiness plan.  ENow Copilot Readiness provides a customizable set of key measurements based on Microsoft 365 usage data that will be used to calculate how ready your organization is to license and enable users for Copilot. Get maximum value from your Copilot investment today with the new ENow Copilot Readiness score & Copilot adoption.

More Visibility: Ensure new workloads are monitored to enable improved service deliverability and uptime information for the latest workload trends.

Add Viva, Copilot, Power Platform URLs to network monitoring (20446).
These added data points give collaboration admins more visibility, bridging the gap between IT and the network team. With an increased number of users adopting these platforms, it’s critical to monitor their status and communicate any issues.

These features let you empower your users and foster innovation; while keeping the control you need to keep your environment safe and running efficiently.

Saving Time and Money: Smarter License Optimization

Keeping up with Microsoft’s ever-changing licensing SKUs and requirements is a headache for every IT team. How much are you spending on Microsoft 365 licenses—and are they being used effectively? With the updated License Optimization Engine, we’ve made it easier to:

• Support the latest Microsoft SKUs and common licensing scenarios.
• Determine the best licenses for your users, ensuring you’re not overspending on E5 licenses when something more cost-effective will do.

Enhance the License Optimization report pack (20416).
Organizations must keep up with the changing needs of users. Microsoft 365 offers many different options for features to be bundled with various licenses.  ENow 8.2 offers an updated License Optimization module to help organizations keep up with the changing needs of their employees and the new license bundles that Microsoft 365 is offering. The following license reports have been updated to align with current Microsoft 365 licensing options:

• Candidates for License Optimization
• Over Licensed Users
• Microsoft 365 License Modeler

Enable the feature protection rules by default (20428).

With more organizations adopting Microsoft’s security functionality and add-ons (such as Microsoft Intune and Conditional access) as a key part of their cybersecurity strategy, we have enabled these security features by default in our Feature Protection Rules. This enhances the output of the Candidates for License Optimization report and provides a better out-of-the-box experience as most organizations want to preserve these features.

Migrate License Optimization controls to the settings web page (20362).
And the best part? These configurations can now be managed directly from our intuitive web interface, saving time, and removing the frustration of navigating to the separate ENow admin console.

In addition, the management of License Optimization features are now accessible via the ENow Settings web page.

These enhancements mean fewer hours spent wrestling with licensing and more opportunities to save money for your organization.

Streamlined Administration: Enhanced Usability

We’ve listened to your feedback about the administrative hurdles you face, and we’ve streamlined key administrative workflows in Version 8.2:

Adjust alerts and configure protections directly within the platform—no extra logins or remote sessions needed.

Add Alert Settings to the Settings web page (14544).

Over the years many have provided feedback that they would like to remotely manage alert settings without having to remote into the ENow web server to launch the ENow Admin Console. In this release we provide web-based controls to manage most of the alert settings for this with the administrator role. In future releases we will build off this section of settings to include more management controls.

Personalize your views with custom dashboards for Exchange and Active Directory, helping you cut through the noise and focus on what matters most for on-premises and hybrid environments.

Improve report interface to allow for custom views (20502).

Many customers have grown to love many of the reports available from the ENow Report Library. An added benefit now available is the ability to share your very own custom view of an ENow report. In this release we encourage all consumers of ENow reports to share the love of their favorite reports with their team members. Be sure to check in with your ENow administrator to manage the access of such custom views.

We are always looking for ways to make our platform more user-friendly. We have included a few highly requested features in this latest release.

Redesign and enhance the Favorites section of the report menu (19387).

In EMS 8.2 we completely redesigned the Favorites section for reports. There will be no limit to the number of favorite reports that may be configured.  The UI is also improved and in line with the latest UI principles that were introduced in EMS 8.0.
Improve report performance (17622).

EMS 8.2 offers a new and improved server-side paging enhancement that will improve load times of all ENow reports available in the library.

These changes will make our platform as user-friendly and efficient as possible for your team.

Other improvements in this release include:

• Need to correct the behavior of the Database Whitespace thresholds to only send an alert and not trigger a monitoring dashboard alert (17077).
• Active Directory Sites Support (19475).
• Exchange Namespaces Sites Support (19496).
• Exchange EDGE Server Sites Support (19500).
• Other Server Sites Support (19574).
• Improve the SLA report export (20328).
• Define Global Setting Section (20374).

Microsoft 365 Resolved Issues

• The Candidates for License Optimization report will display the same license in the License to Remove and License to Add columns (18476).
• The mail flow tests will fail when the primary SMTP and the UPN do not match for the Exchange Online test account (20138).
• ECloud Internet Teams Chat Latency Graph is blank (20367).
• ECloud Internet OneDrive Rename a Document Latency Graph is blank (20368).
• ECloud Internet OneDrive Restore a Document Latency Graph is blank (20369).
• The Remote Probes may lose connectivity, and the heartbeat is no longer received (20530).

ENow for Exchange Resolved Issues

• Need to correct the behavior of the Database Whitespace thresholds to only send an alert and not trigger a monitoring dashboard alert (17077).
• The External Mail Flow test for Exchange servers takes more than an hour to run when several Exchange Namespaces are configured (17330).
• The pie or bar charts for several of the Exchange reports are not being attached as HTML to the email version of the report subscription (18028).
• The Public Folder Tree View report is not displayed properly (20579).

ENow Platform Resolved Issues

• Editing an existing PowerShell or SQL based custom report will result in no selection of the actual report while using the report wizard (20208).
• The option check box “Do not show me this again” after closing the admin console is reset to unchecked after an upgrade (20297).

Known Limitations

• The Exchange Back up status monitoring web page has an alignment issue when mailbox databases have names that are 64 characters in length (16426).
• The Microsoft 365 License Modeler report does not allow for the removal of add-on SKUs (18248).
• The Microsoft 365 License Modeler does not recognize any of the Microsoft 365 Business level SKUs as a base SKU (18356).
• A negative integer or a maximum value of 2147484672 or similar is sometimes returned by WMI when fetching the performance counter information from the Exchange servers (19223).
• If the database size threshold feature is enabled and a database breaches the threshold, then the top-level Disk indicator will be triggered either red or yellow depending on the threshold breached for the Exchange server hosting the offending database (19233).
• The DFS Sysvol Replication reference in the Alerts Configuration of the Admin Console controls the alerts for the DFS Replication Events (19238).
• The ENow Log File Collector will not launch (20546).

Why This Release Matters

Microsoft technologies are evolving at a rapid pace, and staying ahead means having tools that adapt just as quickly. With Version 8.2, you get:

• Better control over your Microsoft 365 environment.
• Cost-saving opportunities that maximize your licensing spend.
• Simplified administrative workflows that save your team time.

We’re here to help you manage your environment with confidence and clarity.

Let us know if you’d like to explore any of these new features further. Together, we can tackle the challenges of Microsoft 365 management and keep your organization ahead of the curve!

Your ENow Team