Licensing Advent Calendar – Day 20 – Security analysis in PPAC and LCS

On day 10, I posted about the Licenses usage summary page in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. This form contains maybe the most essential information to understand the current license requirements and analyse what can be done to lower the license requirements. But did you already know that this information is also available from within PPAC and LCS?

Security analysis

Like the post yesterday, I will refer to the License consumption reports I described earlier, available in PPAC and LCS. Yesterday, I revealed that there is an option to export license report details to CSV. There are more details available in the reports themselves. Let’s talk about what is available, what I didn’t explain yet.

I explained the 5 tiles at the top of the page. For each license SKU, there is more information about the required licenses, the assigned licenses, and the licenses available. In the screenshot below, you can conclude that there are no licenses available for Commerce. Probably, these users show up where there is no intention to use Commerce. For SCM, the number of licenses is not sufficient, whereas for Finance, 25 users need a license, 30 are acquired, and not all have been assigned correctly.

You can drill down into details when you click on View all.

In the example below, I opened the details for the Dynamics 365 Commerce license. You will see all users requiring a Commerce license, but also the other required licenses. In case licenses are missing, this is also visible. Both the required and missing licenses are hyperlinks to details, but different details.

Let’s start with the hyperlink on the Missing licenses. This opens a dialog page with information on the types of licenses that can be used.

In this case, two base licenses with the same price are required. It shows two options. You can either have SCM base and Commerce as attach, or you can use Commerce as a base and an attach for SCM.

The available link on the required licenses brings you to a page where you can see, for each environment, the roles with required licenses for the selected user.

The security role is also a link to more details. It gives information about entitled objects per license SKU.

Unlike the Licenses usage summary page in Dynamics 365, you don’t need to filter on one specific role, as the hyperlink already takes care of the role selection. This is a similar view to the form available in Dynamics 365, where you can see the number of entitled and not entitled objects. In the bottom grid, you can see the objects part of the security role with the access level and whether it is entitled or not. A view with duties and privileges is not available here. To see that detail, you will need to open the form in the Dynamics 365 client. A similar experience as described above is also available in Lifecycle Services.

There is more…

During the Advent period, each day in December, I will share some thoughts and tips related to the Dynamics 365 user license enforcement. If you have questions about this topic, feel free to contact me via LinkedIn, the comments section below, or the contact form on this blog. I will then either update one of the planned blogs for the coming 24 days or answer questions in a new post.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Enforcement Advent Calendar

I do hope you liked this post and will add value for you in your daily work as a professional. If you have related questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the Comment feature below.


That’s all for now. Till next time!