Licensing via Azure Groups

In this blog post, we are going to cover how we can leverage Azure groups to assign licenses to users.

"How does this benefit me?" you might ask, and the answer is simple:

• It offers clear visibility over who has what license
• Can help structure your license assignments, especially if you have different license plans that you use for different things (i.e. E5 for internal users, E3 for external/temp/interns/consultants, Exchange Plan 2 licenses for service accounts etc.)
• Makes it easy to assign/unassign licenses to users/accounts
• This can even be set with a dynamic group, which means new users will automatically get licensed upon creation. As you know, dynamic groups can have criteria (dynamic group rules), that can filter in or out certain accounts. That's why planning a good naming convention to use with accounts is key, but more about this topic in a future post.

Let's see what are the steps to achieve this:

1. Head to https://portal.azure.com , log in with an account that has Billing Administrator or Global Administrator permissions

2. Go to Azure Active Directory (use the waffle button menu in the top left corner, or use the top search bar to find it)

3. Scroll down until you see Licenses
   

4. Choose All products, tick the desired license and click on +Assign up top
   

5. Click on Add Users/Groups and search for your desired license group. If the group does not yet exist, it's a good moment to go in another tab and create it.
   
   I've named mine ugrp_E5_Licenses, and I've added 1 user in the group.

6. You will then be able to see the group under Licensed Groups
   
   Please note that I've left all services turned on. You can see in the previous screenshot that there are 57/57 services enabled. If you want to disable some of the services, please go on the group -> Licenses -> click on the license and then disable whatever service you need ->
   

   With this you should be done with group licensing

Additional Consideration

Now should be a good moment to review the way your licenses are assigned and migrate the users from Direct assignment to Group assignment.

The best way to do this "migration" without your users experiencing disruptions, would be to add the users to the licensing groups first(which can be done via bulk csv user import or scripts). Then, you would need to unassign the users from Direct Assignment.

If you want to see who is Assigned Directly and who is Assigned via Group Inheritance, you can check from Azure Active Directory -> Licenses -> select the license type you want to check and look at the last column ->

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