Azure AD now supports group-based licensing. This feature enables users to assign licenses to users through groups. Consider that your organization contains a security group called “Sales Department” and this group includes all members of the Sales department. You can assign a license to this group and the Azure AD ensures that the group licenses are assigned to all Sales department users.
Any new members who join the group automatically get the group licenses. When they leave the group, group licenses will be removed automatically. For more information, see Group-based licensing in Azure AD.
Group-based licensing requirements
- The license can be applied only for security groups or security-enabled Microsoft 365 groups. You can’t apply a license to a Microsoft 365 group if the group is created without security enabled.
- Requires the Azure AD Premium P1/P2 license and above, or Office 365 Enterprise E3 or Office 365 A3 and above.
- You must have enough available license units to include all the group members. For example, if you have 100 users who are a member of the licensed group, then the license that you are going to apply the group must have at least 100 available units to meet the licensing agreement.
Steps to assign a Microsoft 365 license to Groups
Group-based licensing is currently available only through the Azure portal. Follow the below steps to apply a license to a security group from the Azure portal.
- Sign in to the Azure portal with a Global or License administrator account, select Azure Active Directory.
- In the Azure Active Directory pane, on left-side navigation, select Licenses in the Manage section.
- On the Licenses page, select All Products in the Manage section. Select required licenses to assign and click the Assign button in the toolbar.
- On the Assign license page, select Users and groups. Select a group (ex: Sales Department), and then click the Select button at the bottom of the page to confirm your selection.
- On the Assign license page, click Assignment options, you will see all the service plans from the selected license. You can turn Off some service plans if you don’t want to assign those services to the group members.
- Click Review + assign button, click the Assign button to assign the selected license in the selected group.
Verify Group license assignments
- Go to the Azure Active Directory pane in Azure Portal, on left-side navigation, select Groups in the Manage section.
- Under All groups, search and select the group that licenses were assigned to.
- On the group page, select Licenses. You can confirm the licenses have been successfully assigned to users and you can fix the problem if any errors found. For more infromatio, see Identify and resolve Group license assignment problems.
