Microsoft has announced a new group-based license management solution for Office 365 within Azure AD. The company says the ability has been added in response to customer requests. Users have said they want more robust tools for managing licenses for Microsoft Online Services in Azure AD.
Admins are given more control who gets a product license and what services are made available. Microsoft says the group-based license management solves a significant problem where customers would delay service roll-outs because no service would work at scale.
With the new feature, admins can define a license template and assign it to a security group in Azure AD. This allows the platform to assign and remove licenses per user when they join and leave the group.
At the moment, the solution is available in public preview. Microsoft also introduced a preview of another anticipated Azure AD capability.
Namely, users can now selectively disable service components in product licenses. This addition allows large service suites to be deployed, such as Office 365 Enterprise E5.
Microsoft highlights the feature set for the new group license management:
- Licenses can be assigned using any “security group” in Azure AD, whether synced from on-premises or created directly in Azure AD.
- All Microsoft Online Services that require user-level licensing are supported.
- The administrator can disable one or more service components when assigning a license to a group. This allows staged deployments of rich products like Office 365 Enterprise E5 at scale.
- The feature is only available in the Azure portal.
- Licenses are typically added or removed within minutes of a user joining or leaving a group.
Recent Azure AD Updates
Earlier in the month, Microsoft announced a collaboration with SailPoint. The technical partnership will improve identity governance on the platform. the SailPoint integration means Azure Active Directory Premium customers get a full provisioning and lifecycle governance to enterprise customers on-premises and in the cloud.
