Enabled Services on Microsoft 365 commercial licenses in AAD

[Merlin]

To preface this, the controls I'm referring to can be found using this path: 

Azure Portal > Azure Active Directory > Users > (select user record) > Licenses > (select Microsoft 365 commercial license)

We had an issue wherein SMTP authentication from our MFPs was failing. While investigating, we discovered that the Exchange Online (Plan 1) service that's packaged with the Microsoft 365 Business Standard license was turned off on the user that we use for this implementation. Because of that, the user's mailbox disappeared from exchange. After enabling Exchange Online (Plan 1) in the AAD admin center, everything started working again. 

While it's troubling that this service was seemingly turned off without our intervention, what's more troubling is that I became curious and started checking other user records--including my own. I found that the Exchange Online (Plan 1) service was turned off--yet my mailbox was working just fine. I found other users with the same anomaly. 

Does anyone have any insight on how or why this would happen? For additional background, we transitioned from Exchange 2013 on-prem to Exchange Online back in 10/2020. We're not operating on hybrid exchange. It's fully online. 

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Merlin

I don't directly have an answer to your question of why it's behaving like this. But what I can advise you is to check the audit logs to see if someone manually had changed the license for this particular user. Azure AD > Select the user > click on Audit logs > set the filter Activity to Change user license.

Also, remember that SMTP is labeled as basic/legacy authentication and will be disabled from 2022. I would recommend you to use OAuth SMTP.

More information can be found here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/basic-authentication-and-exchange-online-s...

[#3]

Thanks for the response, Bilalel. We use this user for our MFPs and we're already working on getting it transitioned to OAuth SMTP.

I will check the audit logs. Thanks again.