Forum Discussion
SharePoint online licensing requirements for AAD member accounts
- If that member account belongs to someone that is not part of your organization, you are compliant with the licensing model...if you are using member accounts for organization users and provide access to them to SPO without a license, you are not compliant with the licensing model
Hello Juan Carlos,
Thank you for the reply. This does confirm my initial assumptions.
The MS literature on this was pretty clear a few years ago. Now there are official and non official articles all over the place that contradict each other in regards to SharePoint online licensing requirements.
The definition of an external is very clear and there is no confusion on what constitutes and external user. However there is no clear documentation on the conditions at which an internal user (member) can be provided access to a resource on SharePoint Online.
Since a organization can technically create non-licensed AAD member accounts without assigning an Office 365 license, all sites and resources in SharePoint online shared with the Everyone group will be shared with them. So essentially an organization may be breaking the license agreement without even knowing they are.
Other example is someone sends out a link to a document on SharePoint Online to the whole company. Everybody has Exchange Online licenses but only 10% of the organization have SharePoint Online licenses. This would imply that the organization is breaking the MS license agreement on a massive scale.
I can give dozens of everyday business scenarios where an organization will be breaking the license agreement when there are unlicensed SharePoint Online users.
I even opened a support ticket to Office 365 support to ask this very same question and they gave me the instructions to create a non licensed AAD account and then share the site or resource with the user. So MS support is instruction organizations to break the MS license agreement for SharePoint? Seems surprising to me.
Anyway this is why I am second guessing that there are any licensing requirements for SharePoint online for internal users. If there were I am not sure why MS would allow non-compliant behavior at
this scale.
The best article I found that covers the subject is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-b2b-licensing
While it does not talk about SharePoint online licensing but does cover the matter of AAD licensing requirements very well. Maybe Sharepoint licensing follows the same rules? 1 licensed user for every 5 non-licensed user?
Comments and replies more than welcome! We want to keep our customers compliant :)
Imagine everybody does the same advised by support so buying a single E1 license in my Office 365 tenant is enough to have SPO and them I only need to follow the steps to provide access to SPO to the rest of the folks that are part of my organization but without requiring to assign a valid SPO license to them. If you are a Microsoft partner providing advice to your customers in regards of licensing, then you surely know there are other trusted sources to ask about licensing stuff than Microsoft support.
In summary, any organizational folk that requires to access SPO needs a valid SPO license.