Sitting on the train yesterday evening, I was glancing across my Twitter feed when I noticed this beauty that I had to share.
Granted, the feature may be in preview right now so doesn’t quite have it’s game face on just yet but it’s still really worth looking at.
You now have ability to assign Office 365 licenses based on either Azure Active Directory or on-premise synchronised Active Directory group membership (a security group to be specific). No longer do we need to assign the licenses to each user individually or use PowerShell scripts to bulk assign the membership. Simply assign the proper licenses to the group and then make sure everyone is a member of that group. When a user is added to the group, they get the licenses and when the user is removed from the group, they get the licenses taken away, simples.
This may seem like a small feature but for customers’ adopting Office 365 from scratch or for existing customers who are buying up new features or activating license sub-components as part of a progressive Office 365 rollout, this will be an invaluable time saver. You can even have multiple groups and use dynamic group membership to have the groups populated based on attributes of a user object.
I see a real use case for this group based license assignment in scenarios where you have a limited number of licenses available for a particular product and you need to re-assign them from one individual to another. A would be a great example where one department need to use Power BI Pro but another does not and as a users’ department attribute changes from Sales to Operations (as an example), the licenses get moved around. For customers automating their starter and leaver processes, no longer will you need PowerShell Cmdlets which connect to Office 365 and assign the licenses. Just make sure the user is created as a member of the relevant groups and off they go.
I look forward to seeing this feature go into general availability and being used by customers in the field.