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Azure AD group-based license management is now generally available!
Published Nov 02 2018 09:00 AM 18.3K Views

Howdy folks!

 

I am excited to announce that group-based licensing is now generally available! As part of our general availability release, we made the service more scalable by adding these capabilities:

 

  • Developer APIs in Microsoft Graph to allow you to programmatically read group-based licensing assignments on groups, as well as programmatically get assignment status and errors.
  • Ability to reprocess group-based licensing assignments for a single user.
  • Simplified licensing requirements for group-based licensing. Users who are targeted for group-based licensing need Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Basic (and above), or Office 365 E3/A3 (and above).

To start using group-based licensing, look at our Assign licenses to users by group membership in Azure AD documentation.

 

We always love to hear your feedback and suggestions, and we look forward to hearing from you! Let us know what you think in the comments below.

 

Best regards,

Alex Simons (@Alex_A_Simons )

Corporate VP of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

8 Comments

Good call on the relaxed licensing requirements.

Brass Contributor

Good timing.  I just implemented group-based licensing for about half my company for our m365 users for about half the company. 

Brass Contributor
Perfect announcement, we already have this in place for some time. The only thing missing now is the use of nested groups, when will this be available?

We are evaluating what to do about nested groups overall. Nothing finalized yet.

Brass Contributor

Also voteing for the nested group feature, that is essential in our enviroment.
But we would also move to Group based licensing when the nested group feature is ready.

Copper Contributor

Greetings Alex, sorry this comment is several months after your original post, but I'm having difficulty getting a straight answer from my rep or support.  We here at our organization have a O365 G3 subscription (as opposed to A3 or E3), which is just basically the Government Cloud equivalent to the E3.   I have been unable to use the Azure AD Group-based licensing as the options either do not exist or are grayed out in my interface.  Support says it's because I'm G3, but when I go and ask my rep, one of his coworkers says it REQUIRES Azure AD Basic, not even the O365 E3/A3 option is valid. (he even said the documentation is wrong on your own website).   I'm just trying to get a straight answer, do you know if G3 can have it?  If so, is there a reason why I would not have the options?    Again sorry to ask this here, but this is the first actual post I've found from a Microsoft person that does state what I originally though it was with the ability to comment back. 

 

Thanks for your time!

Brass Contributor

@jdobiash a Azure AD Premium license or E3 license is required for the use of Group-based license.

Check out this document https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/active-directory-licensing-what...

Iron Contributor

"Ability to reprocess group-based licensing assignments for a single user."

 

Is this only via the GUI, or can this be done via PowerShell somehow? Use case - Reactivating a user who doesn't have a license yet and trying to run a set of user configuration commands against them, including enabling UM which needs the license there before it can be set up.

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Last update:
‎Jul 24 2020 01:50 AM
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