Licensing Advent Calendar – Day 23 – Assign licenses

In the past 22 days, I shared a lot about understanding the license reports, cleaning up users and security roles to save on excessive license costs, together with some tips and background information. Now reaching the end of the Advent Calendar, I realize that I still have a lot to write about. Today, let’s talk about assigning the licenses.

Recommended actions

Once you have cleaned up users who weren’t offboarded correctly, reviewed the security roles, and correctly assigned these roles, you need to check if you have sufficient licenses. If not, you will need to acquire additional licenses.

On the license report, you can see the number of users requiring what product license. The overview doesn’t tell you the number of base versus attach license requirements. E.g., a user with a missing SCM license can have a Finance or HR license. In case of a Finance license, you can choose to assign an SCM attach, or you can assign a base SCM and replace the current Finance base with a Finance attach. If the user has an HR license, the SCM can’t be an attach license. You can review my blog about the Dynamics 365 Licensing (day 3).

You can export the users with required licenses to CSV and use Excel to create an overview of the exact licenses needed.

Assign licenses

There are various options to assign licenses to users. The licensing reports do have an option to let a security administrator assign licenses in Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

On the various users’ pages on the license reports, you can see if there is a license is assigned or not. If you click the link on any of the users, you get a dialog page showing none of the assigned licenses.

You can open the Microsoft 365 Admin Center to assign the missing licenses. A dialog with the selected user will then directly opened.

You can assign the licenses and save the changes. On the License assignment details, the license is directly visible.

The licensing reports aren’t refreshed directly. The reports are refreshed between 4 and 12 hours. In case you need to assign more licenses, you can leave the Microsoft 365 Admin Center open and assign the licenses without going back and forth to the Finance and Operations license report.

New users

When you create a new user, it is recommended to assign licenses. The user creation process has a step where you can assign these licenses.

The question is whether the person creating the user knows which exact Dynamics 365 licenses need to be assigned. Usually, it is easy to select the office licenses, but the Dynamics 365 F&O licenses depend on the security roles that will be assigned. A clear procedure is required if you want to assign the Dynamics 365 licenses at this step. It is also possible to skip the assignment of licenses and add these later.

Entra ID groups

It is possible to assign licenses to Microsoft Entra ID groups. In case a user is assigned to a group as a member, the licenses will be auto-assigned based on availability.

Using the same Entra ID groups as you use for the security role assignments is not recommended. These groups aren’t smart enough to know that in case a user gets a group for project timesheets and another, for e.g. project manager, that the Team member license isn’t required. It also doesn’t know if a standard base, premium, or attach license is required.

Still, it is possible to use Entra ID groups, but then you can create a group per license SKU, assign the license, and add members.

Automation

You can also think of an automation for assigning licenses. I’m currently working on a Power Automate Flow, which is checking available Dynamics 365 licenses via MS Graph, the license requirement for the user based on role assignments, and missing licenses. When available, it assigns a base, attach, or additional license (Operations – Activity, Team members, HR Self Service. I will share the Power Automate flow templates with instructions and (current) limitations soon.

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!