Issue: How does Elements Collaboration Protection subscription usage work? How does Collaboration Protection allocate licenses when there are more mailboxes than licenses available?
Resolution:
License usage for Elements Collaboration Protection is based on the number of mailboxes currently protected. A single subscription can be shared across multiple Cloud Service tenants, and the license limit is enforced across all tenants combined — they draw from the same pool.
How license allocation works
Initial setup or protection settings change
Protect all mailboxes
When "Protect all mailboxes" is enabled, the system attempts to protect every mailbox in the tenant. If the number of mailboxes exceeds the available licenses — including licenses already consumed by other tenants sharing the same subscription — mailboxes are protected in alphabetical order by email address until no licenses remain. Any mailboxes that do not fit are automatically switched off.
Customize protection for mailboxes
When "Customize protection for mailboxes" is enabled, the customer manually selects which mailboxes to protect from the mailbox list. Licenses are assigned only to the mailboxes explicitly selected. If the number of selected mailboxes exceeds the available licenses, the selection cannot be completed until enough licenses are free. Optionally, the "Automatically protect newly-added mailboxes" toggle can be turned on to automatically protect newly discovered mailboxes without manual selection — see daily operations below.
Daily operations
When new mailboxes are discovered
Protect all mailboxes: Newly discovered mailboxes are assigned any available licenses in alphabetical order. If the subscription is already at its limit, newly discovered mailboxes are switched off immediately — existing protected mailboxes are never displaced to make room for new ones.
Customize protection for mailboxes: Newly discovered mailboxes are not protected automatically unless the "Automatically protect newly-added mailboxes" toggle is enabled. If it is enabled, newly discovered mailboxes are assigned available licenses in alphabetical order. If the limit is already reached, new mailboxes are switched off and must be enabled manually once a license becomes free.
When licenses are freed
Protect all mailboxes: When a license is freed, it is automatically assigned to the first alphabetically available mailbox that was previously switched off due to license limits within the same tenant. Already protected mailboxes remain protected. Note that freed licenses are not redistributed across other tenants sharing the same subscription — only the tenant being scanned benefits from the newly available license.
Customize protection for mailboxes: When a license is freed, it must be manually assigned to a mailbox. Existing unprotected mailboxes are not treated as newly discovered and will not be automatically protected even if the "Automatically protect newly-added mailboxes" toggle is enabled — that toggle only applies to mailboxes added for the first time.
Viewing license usage
- Log in to the Elements Collaboration Protection portal
- Go to the Cloud services page
- Select the Subscription view tab from the top right corner
- View the subscription usage column for each subscription key (expand the drop-down to see which Cloud Service tenants are consuming licenses)
Configuring which mailboxes to protect
- Log in to the Elements Collaboration Protection portal
- Select Cloud services on the sidebar
- Select Configure protection in the row of the relevant connection in the Exchange column (or click on the protected/unprotected count)
- In the page that opens:
- Select Protect all mailboxes to protect all existing mailboxes in your Microsoft Exchange account.
- Select Customize protection for mailboxes to manually choose which mailboxes to protect from the mailbox list.
- Enable the Automatically protect newly-added mailboxes toggle if you want newly discovered mailboxes to be automatically added to protection. If this toggle is off, new mailboxes must be added manually.
- To protect a specific unprotected mailbox, select it from the mailbox list and choose Turn on protection at the bottom of the page. Its status will change to "Protected".