Azure AD Group based licensing in Office 365

I decided to take a different approach to talking about Azure AD Group based licensing for Office 365 with this post and decided to pop up a quick 10 minute video demo of it in action.

Azure AD Group based licensing came into preview in the new Azure Portal about 2 weeks ago now and so far I’ve been impressed with it. It’s currently available to all levels of Azure AD including the basic tier that comes as part of an Office 365 tenancy. Whether it remains that way after GA remains to be seen. I hope it does as for me it answers a lot of what is lacking around license management for the enterprise using Office 365.

I hope you enjoy the video and please contact me either here in comments or via @Cimares on twitter if you have any questions.

For more details, also see the very good docs published by MS on this subject.

Paul.

 

2 comments

    • Jerry O on Thu 17 Aug 17 at 2:38 pm
    • Reply

    After making changes to licenses using the AD Group method, I believe that disables the ability to modify the licenses in the O365 portal. Are you seeing the same issue? That being said this could cause a lot of problems for admins moving forward.

    From – http://blog.softwareone.com/managing-microsoft-office-365-licenses-using-groups

    The Office 365 admin portal does not currently support group-based licensing. If a user inherits a license from a group, this license appears in the Office admin portal as a regular user license. If you try to modify that license (for example, to disable a service in the license), or try to remove the license, the portal returns an error message. Inherited group licenses cannot be modified directly on a user.

    1. Yes that’s right. Once a user no longer has directly assigned licenses from that Product group, the licenses can no longer be manually edited. The idea behind this is that companies can enforce a licensing model using AD Groups, rather than using the Office 365 user admin panel. For larger companies this makes a lot of sense as the GUI isn’t well suited to managing thousands of people.

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