Simplified License Assignment with Azure AD and EMS

First published on CloudBlogs on Sep, 18 2014
Howdy folks, Since launching Azure AD Premium and the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) we have been hearing your requests for simplifying the Azure AD approach for end user license management. Today we are starting a preview for group-based license management. You can now assign a security group and Azure AD will automatically assign licenses to all the members of the group. If a user is subsequently added to, or removed from the group, a license will be automatically assigned or removed as appropriate. You can use groups you synchronize from on-premises AD or manage in Azure AD. Pairing this up with Azure AD premium Self-Service Group Management you can easily delegate license assignment to the appropriate decision makers. You can be assured that problems like license conflicts and missing location data are automatically sorted out. To use this go to the licensing tab in your Azure AD directory

Fig 1: Azure AD licenses tab

Select assign from the tray (or navigate into the license type) and set the view filter to group (all groups)

Fig 2: User selection for license assignment

Select the groups that you want to assign and confirm the selection (click "Assign").

Fig 3: Confirmation

The group will be marked for automated assignment and its members will be assigned independently in the background. A few details (the fine print):

• Public preview of group-based licensing supports Enterprise Mobility Suite, AAD Premium and AAD Basic.
• Group-based licensing supports direct group assignment only. Members of nested groups will not inherit the licenses.
• Automated usage location assignment will ensure that any user without a specifically defined usage location will inherit the tenant location.
• Conflict issues are addressed by allowing a user to be concurrently assigned any combination of AAD Premium, Intune, Enterprise Mobility Suite and AAD Basic.
• Users can also be assigned Azure AD Rights Management Service through both Office and EMS.

I hope you will try this new feature out and let us know what you think. As always we'd love to hear any feedback or suggestions you have. Best regards, Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons ) Director of Program Management Active Directory