Finding who a license is allocated to...

[deejinoz]

Hi, I have a client with multiple CSP subscriptions to various MS 365 products taken out at various times over the year. I am processing a renewal for an Exchange Online (Plan 1) subscription and the client has asked me who the license is allocated to? Which is a fair question. However, it seems to be one I can't answer, with any of the information given in various parts of the Admin Center.

If I look under the users, I can see who has an Exchange Online (Plan 1) license allocated but no indication of which specific license (i.e. One that's up for renewal now). If I look at the list of Products for this client I can see that they have multiple Exchange Online (Plan 1) licenses but I cannot see any expiry dates to find out which one is being renewed?

What I was expecting to see is a subscription GUID that I could use to tie between licensing and users. Am I or the Admin Center missing something fairly fundamental here, in terms of reporting and subscription management?

[#2]

Go under Billing > Licenses in Admin Center, and click the link in there, it'll show you who is assigned those licenses there.

[#3]

Thanks for the reply, Chris. Whilst that does indeed show a list of who has one of these licenses it doesn't actually say which one this license renewal applies to. The link is broken in the reporting of license usage and allocation. How is anybody supposed to be able to identify who a renewal is for, when a renewal notice arrives? Strikes me the Admin Center has a fairly fundamental reporting flaw in its design. Even if Microsoft were to add something so simple as an expiry date against each user we'd have a significantly better chance of tying the renewals to the user they are for. As I have said, ideally, this should actually give us a license GUID to make the link absolute. I know the data is in there, it has to be. All we need is for Microsoft to work it out and give it to us. This is a classic example of them fixing it once for the benefit of tens of thousands of admins/partners.

[#4]

Yeah it was even worse than it is now a year or so ago. You can at least now pull up all your subscriptions on sub tab and find the expired ones there. But as far as the one it's assigned too it's random, that specific expired license doesn't apply to a specific user. Basically once your count goes below the number you have it basically picks a random person to remove license from.

[#5]

Random! That makes me nervous. I know there are no doubt hundreds of millions of users worldwide but with all the smart people and resources at Microsoft's disposal I don't get it how they could design this so poorly. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to ask, who is this renewal for and completely unreasonable for Microsoft to prevent us from answering this. Each license has a guid, surely and at time of allocating a license to a user a link is established. So, as I said, the data has to be there as well as the association. I can't believe it is random.

[#6]

Any update on this?

SURELY there is a licence ID or something or some way of finding out which of the 25 licences we pay for are assigned to what user.

I have a staff member moving on so I need to switch off a renewal but have no idea which one to switch off?