What is a seat

At Keepit, we use "seat" as the metric to measure your consumption of our services. Each seat you purchase represents a licensed user or an item from your organization. These are products to which you can assign Keepit services.

In our Microsoft 365 connector, we have four licensing areas (resources) where we count seats:

  • Exchange
  • OneDrive
  • SharePoint
  • Teams & Groups

How Microsoft licenses are counted as seats

For a full license breakdown of which M365 license corresponds with which type of Keepit seat, see: How Microsoft licenses are counted as Keepit seats

What counts as a seat

Seats in Exchange / OneDrive

Exchange and OneDrive are licensed separately but follow the same basic pattern.

Requirements for a user to count as a seat

To qualify as a seat in Exchange / OneDrive, the following must be true:

  • User must be selected for backup in the relevant configuration directly or indirectly (groups-based)
  • User must be active 

  • User must have an assigned relevant Microsoft Office 365 license with an appropriate plan enabled (this includes licenses such as Enterprise Mobility + Security E3 that that may not include a mailbox but that have the Exchange foundation in the product plan)

  • User must belong to the tenant (not a guest)

If all of the above requirements are met, then this counts as 1 seat for either Exchange or OneDrive.

Additional information

  • A seat automatically includes the backup of In-Place archives.
  • Public Folders are not counted as seats.
  • If a shared mailbox is selected for backup and meets all the same requirements as a user, then it is counted as a seat.
  • An inactive user is treated the same as a deleted user. While it may still have a license, it won't be backed up or counted as a seat. 


Seats in SharePoint / Groups & Teams

Requirements for a user to count as a seat

Since it is not possible to directly select users, we look at which users actually have access to the resources we are backing up.

To qualify as a seat in SharePoint or Groups & Teams, the following must be true:

  • User must part of the site or group 
    • For Groups & Teams, this means the user is a member or owner of the group
    • For SharePoint, this means the user is an admin, owner, member, visitor of the site, or user with unique permissions
  • User must be a member of at least one group or site
  • User must be active (not active users are placed under deleted tab in Admin panel)
  • User must not be a guest
  • User must have at least one license that grants access to groups or sites

If all of the above requirements are met, then this counts as 1 seat for either SharePoint or Groups & Teams.

Users of which sites / groups are counted   

  • Only SharePoint is backed up:
    • We count users from all types of sites (communication sites, site collections, and team sites) as SharePoint seats.
  • Only Groups & Teams is backed up:
    • We count only members of groups (not team sites) as Groups & Teams seats. 
  • Both SharePoint and Groups & Teams are backed up:
    • We count users from communication sites and site collections as SharePoint seats. 
    • We do not count users from teams sites as SharePoint seats, unless they are also using communication sites or site collections in which case they will count as SharePoint seats.
    • We count members of groups as Groups & Teams seats.  

Additional information

Global admin service accounts that are used to set up backups/create connectors (even though they are made a group member or site administrator) are not counted as seats. However, if they are selected for backup in Exchange or OneDrive, they will be counted as a seat.

Subsites

Since it is impossible to be a member of a subsite without being a member of the top-level site, there is no reason to count users of subsites. 

This means that we only count users of the top-level sites and ignore subsites.