Azure Group License Assignment

Adding Office 365 licenses to users isn’t necessarily an arduous task, but letting security group assignment (whether on-premise or in Azure) provision the licenses for you is a nice way to automate the process. This can also make licensing reporting easier by simply looking at group assignment.

To start, create a group with a relevant name; such as, “365 License” or whatever you prefer. If you’re in a hybrid environment, wait for it to sync to the cloud, or if you’re in Azure only, proceed to the next step.

Once in Azure Active Directory, select groups, then search for the group name.

Select the group, and under the new settings, select “Licenses.”

In the new area, select the assignment option at the top, then select the license you want to apply to that group.

Now, when you add users to that group, it will automatically provision the license assignment. In this example we were looking at Office 365 licenses, but it can be done with other Microsoft subscriptions. For a quick report you could run:

Get-ADGroupMember -Identity “365 License” | measure

Take the count output number multiplied by your license costs, and you can shoot that over to finance quicker than they’ve ever seen.

One final note, if you are going to do this with Microsoft Audio Conferencing, you need to add the Office 365 license assignment, and the Microsoft 365 Audio Conferencing assignment to the same group. The Audio Conference license has a dependency on the 365 license and it will only look at its own group.

Thanks for reading!