Forum Discussion
Azure AD group-based license management for Office 365 and more
Group-based licensing will be a feature of all the paid Azure AD editions. (And it is included now during the public preview period)
That means Azure AD Basic, Azure AD Premium P1 and P2 and of course EMS E3 and E5 that includes Azure AD Premium.
Also will be a feature of Office 365 E3 and Office 365 E5 when it becomes generally avaialble.
Now, for EDU organizations things are rather simple becasue Azure AD Basic is free for them so by adding the free Azure AD Basic edition to their tenant they can use Group-Based Licensing for all the related products.
I hope this helps
Nasos
We found that the “Azure AD group-based license management” (in public preview) is not currently smart enough to recognize a single user license between E3 and E5. It “double dips”, so a user who has an E5 license (direct or inherited) and an E3 license (direct or inherited) takes up two license; one E3 and one E5. This scenario did not create any warning or alert from the system. Is there a UserVoice style area to communicate with folks evaluating what will be GA?
The problem here isn't the AD Group based implementation. it honours whatever licensing rules are applied by the platform. Therefore if you can apply the two license templates in the Office 365 UI, then you can do the same in the Group Based templates.
In this instance, it's a viable solution to apply elements from both E3 and E5 to a single user (Note I said viable.. not sensible!). You'll find that you can tick both E3 and E5 in the Office 365 UI. If you tried to do the same using and F1 and E3 or F1 and E5 it would throw an error in the UI and also in the Group Based licensing interfaces.
Paul Hunt - Cimares I like your quantifier "(Note I said viable.. not sensible!)"
The problem, of course is, if a thing is not sensible, someone will still try to do it at the expense of others around them.
I do understand what you are saying though.
We - large scale corporate implementation - will need a reasonable way of reporting on it or preventing it.
Pulling the data per user per license per service down from the tenant via PowerShell then republishing it via PowerBI is also viable but not sensible. ;)
My tests of the group-based license management is going well. Its value is clear especially given Microsoft's gross propensity to force service plans out as "Enabled by default". (another viable not sensible example)