Forum Discussion
Licensing Admin Roles
Hi Matt,
Has Juan said, yes, user management is capable to license users:
You can read more here - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Assign-licenses-to-users-in-Office-365-for-business-997596b5-4173-4627-b915-36abac6786dc?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
FYI, the easiest way to manage license is in the Azure Portal using Group Based licensing, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-licensing-group-assignment-azure-portal
Unfortunately we don't have the AAD Premium licensing that allows this. However, it's something we're looking into. Most of our licensing is automated via PowerShell, but there are some one off scenarios where we need to modify licenses for pilot programs, etc., and I need to delegate access to do that without granting global admin access.
Keep in mind that this is just one of the many benefits of AAD Premium.
Keeping a powershell script up to date to ensure that it correctly incorporates the new apps and their licensing options can be a significant effort. This is something that is easy to get wrong and typically requires careful testing. It may be worthwhile to do a cost analysis comparing the time spent maintaining these type of scripts to the AAD premium costs.
- While I agree that the group based method is nice, we had this automation need long before group-based licensing was available and so had to create our own approach. We've been doing this license automation for at least a couple of years now and it's been rock solid. Check out my approach here:
https://mattmcnabb.github.io/Office-365-Licensing_4
Rather than try to keep up with new service plans, I can take the reverse approach and only license users for the service plans that are explicitly allowed. There's a bit more automation around this to test if a user is out of license compliance, but this covers the basic idea.
Also, I've recently updated this approach to use the AzureAD module rather than MSOnline.