Dynamics 365: View license requirement per object

The actual license enforcement for Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O is activated for a lot of organizations worldwide. Although Microsoft provided reports and tooling, a lot of organizations still need help from experts with experience. Based on feedback, Microsoft has now added the ability to view license requirements per object. In this blog post, you will learn about the new information and how you can use it as a tool for analyzing and reconfiguring your security roles.

Recap: Deprecated features

While Microsoft restructured the license calculation last year, one of the most valuable tools got deprecated. The license information on View permissions was removed. On the Licenses usage summary page, where only information per role, duty, and privilege was provided, leaving us with some open questions. You had to jump into background tables to get some insights on licenses per object.

In the screenshot below, there is one example where it is impossible to know which licenses will fulfill the elements of the role. There is no single license SKU where the column Not entitled is zero. That means that there are more licenses triggered for one single role. To know which licenses, you should go to the User Role Licenses tab page. When the role is assigned to a user, you could read that, e.g., the Finance, SCM, and Project Operations licenses were required.

With the information about entitled versus not entitled per object in the lower grid, there was no indication of what license is required. To get that information, I jumped into the table series, and at Next365, we built an internal tool bringing back the license information per object in the user interface.

Object licenses view

With the latest quality update for Dynamics 365 F&O version 10.0.47 and 10.0.48, Microsoft introduced a new preview feature bringing information back in the user interface.

To get the feature available, you will need to update to the latest quality update and enable the feature called (Preview) User security governance object license view. If you updated your environment and don’t see the feature, then click on the button Check for updates.

Once the feature is enabled, there is a new tab page available on the Licenses usage summary page called Security object licenses. The screen is best visible if you change your user options visibility to show more details on the screen.

In the screenshot above, I filtered on my security role and all licenses containing Finance, SCM, Commerce, Project Operations, and Human Resources. This will give the information that was not available before in the user interface. With this information, you can also search for the elements requiring, e.g., the Project operations license if that is targeted to be removed from the role. If you have collected the menu items, you can also see via which privilege and duty these elements are part of the role.

In case there is an option to choose between different licenses, all of the possible licenses are listed in the License column.

There is more…

I think the new information is a huge improvement and makes people more productive in analyzing and adjusting security roles for license compliance. If you want to learn more, Microsoft provided information about this feature on Microsoft Learn: License Usage Summary Security Object Licenses view (Preview) – Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365

Unfortunately, on View permissions that can be opened via the Security configuration page, the license column is not reinstated (yet). My request to Microsoft will be to add license information back to this page. That will help in understanding the license impact when configuring the security. Anyway, you can consider a customization based on the new table storing the details for this view: LicensingSecurityObjectExplodedGraph.

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!