In this post I will show you multiple methods on how to assign O365 license to users. We can assign the license using various portals such as “Microsoft 365 admin center”, “Azure Portal”, “Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin centre”. For repetitive activity, I will show you how to assign O365 license to users using PowerShell command which requires AzureAD module to be installed. Though we can use MSOnline Module as well but that is soon going to be depreciated, hence recommended module to install is AzureAD. This is not just limited to Office 365 license but any other kind of license which has been assigned to you.
Assign License through Azure Active Directory licenses
Easiest way to assign license is to go to Azure Active Directory and navigate to Licenses > All Products.
This will list all products assigned. Click on Assign to open another blade “Assign license”, click “Add Users and groups” to assign license. Under “Assignment options”, you can select / deselect various Apps and services to control license option at granular level.
The same process can be done by navigating to “Microsoft 365 admin center”, navigate to Billing > Licenses to get list of all products. Once you click on a specific product, you can see list of available licenses along with users assigned to the specific license. Click on Assign licenses to start assigning the products.
Assign license through Azure Active Directory specific user’s license assignment.
This option is more specific to assigning a license for a specific user. Under Azure Active Directory, click on Users and select any specific user you are looking for. This will open user specific blade where you need to click on Licenses. Here you can see list of all licenses / Products assigned to user along with “Enabled services” for that specific license.
Click on Assignments to assign single / multiple licenses to user.
The biggest advantage of user’s license node is that we can see multiple licenses assigned to the user in a single window to check and verify if appropriate license has been assigned or not.
The process remains same while you navigate to Microsoft Endpoint Manager portal. Navigate to Users > All Users, and by selecting specific user, proceed the same steps as mentioned above.
Assigning license to specific user through Microsoft 365 admin center can also be done. Click on Users > Active Users, select specific user to open user’s blade. Click on “Licenses and apps” tab to see list of all available license. You can not only select multiple licenses here but also can specify User’s location which is also known as “Usage Location” for user’s profile. This option is quite handy as license cannot be assigned if Usage Location is not specific for user. This option allows to perform that option too if haven’t specified earlier rather than getting error message.
Use PowerShell command to assign Office 365 license
This is one of the preferred way to assign the license if you have multiple users to get the license assigned. Suppose you have 100 different users and out of that there are 3 different categories of licences to be assigned. This is not going to be an easy task to assign the license through GUI. I would rather prefer a PowerShell command to perform this activity.
For assigning various kind of Microsoft product licenses through PowerShell, we require AzureAD module to be installed (we can use MSOnline module as well, however AzureAD is the most latest one). These are the steps to be performed to assign license.
Open PowerShell with elevated rights and run following command to install AzureAD module:
Install-Module AzureAD
We need to connect to our Tenant, for that run:
Connect-AzureAD
This will ask for credentials, once provided you will be able to see the information of Account, Environment,TenantID, TenantDomain
To get list of license we have with Tenant, run:
Get-AzureADSubscribedSku | select SkuPartNumber
To assign license to multiple users, use this command:
$users="[email protected]","[email protected]"
foreach ($user in $users){
$planName="TEAMS_EXPLORATORY"
$License = New-Object -TypeName Microsoft.Open.AzureAD.Model.AssignedLicense
$License.SkuId = (Get-AzureADSubscribedSku | Where-Object -Property SkuPartNumber -Value $planName -EQ).SkuID
$LicensesToAssign = New-Object -TypeName Microsoft.Open.AzureAD.Model.AssignedLicenses
$LicensesToAssign.AddLicenses = $License
Set-AzureADUserLicense -ObjectId $user -AssignedLicenses $LicensesToAssign
}
You can also export csv with list of all users if there are hundreds of entries.
Conclusion
Assigning the Office 365, intune related license etc can be done in multiple ways and through various different portals though most common one is Microsoft 365 admin center. Assigning the user license using PowerShell command is the most handy one if you have multiple licenses for multiple users to assign.
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