Are licenses used by Exchange Online Mail Contacts and Active Directory Contacts

[djonestp]

I tried searching for an answer to this in the forums, but I'm not finding anything specific. While prepping a backup for users, I see exchange online mail contacts identified as "users". I also see names and e-mail addresses of accounts that are in active directory, but do not have an actual company e-mail address or mailbox or have an external e-mail address specified. To be clear, we sometimes will create an exchange online mail contact for a person outside of the company, so that we can add that e-mail address to a distribution list that needs to contain internal and external addresses. Those addresses do not belong to the company in any way. In the case of our AD, we users in AD that are vendors or consultants that need to login to the company network. They don't have a company e-mail address or mailbox. We enter their own company e-mail address in their account settings in AD, for informational purposes. Since Veeam is seeing these addresses as "users", instead of what they are (exchange online contacts or external addresses not really part of the organization), is a license used for them? If so, is there anyway to prevent a license from being used by them?

Just thinking here... should this be some sort of feature request to properly identify these entries for what they are and make is easy to exclude them.

[Mike Resseler]

Derek,

Are you seeing those in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365?

[djonestp]

Yes I am. I included a link to a screen shot of the add object window (heavily edited for privacy). Each item you can see is either an exchange online mail contact or an account in AD belonging to a vendor/consultant, where we specify what their e-mail address is, in the account properties. You can see they're listed as "users". There are many more like this.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/NnNxY2eQBqnDVpKB6

[Polina]

Derek,

External users, if seen as active in AAD, are enumerated in VBO, but they don't consume licenses.