Risk-free Friday evenings, thanks to Office 365 license management

Office 365 directors have a reason to be happy: Microsoft has finally joined the party on group-based workplace 365 licence management, saving time from manual maintenance, or the reliance on scripts and third-party systems.

The 'before' time

Until earlier this year, directors of workplace 365 had no pure native thanks to automatise applying licences to their user base. they may already apply licences manually, of course, through either the net interface or PowerShell.

The web interface methodology may be a rather long methodology and solely suited to terribly tiny firms. It additionally offers an oversized margin of user error, as a result of requiring many choices toggled off or on supported necessities. Doing this for every add/move/change in Associate in Nursing setting may be a tedious task that may frustrate anyone trustworthy enough to assign those licences.

Using PowerShell may be a higher method; it may be alittle cumbersome to wrap your head round the syntaxes and commands to pipe along once distribution a licence the primary time, however it will the duty. Being PowerShell driven, these commands may be machine-driven through regular Tasks to check what is modified (including adding or removing a user from a security cluster in Active Directory). This provides an affordable level of automation, however it needs the administrator to bring their own resolution.

Third parties additionally provide machine-driven workplace 365 licence management, however these square measure typically tied into different offerings, and produce other advantages and prices hooked up to them, as an example ticketing systems, user account management utilities, identity management solutions. For people who had one amongst these larger solutions, victimisation them would be a no brainer compared to the native choices.

Welcome to the fashionable era

Now, nearly six years since workplace 365 was floated, Microsoft has free the Azure Active Directory Group-Based License Management as a public preview. The feature is out there for all customers globally.

The fact it's taken farewell – workplace 365 arrived in 2011 – may be a surprise. Windows seven was still Microsoft's newest desktop software package (Windows eight was free a year later) and Microsoft workplace 2010 was the most recent productivity suite in an exceedingly post-Clippy world. we've it currently, though, and Microsoft workers themselves admit that this type of resolution has been one amongst their high requests for a awfully lasting.

The new Azure portal let's you produce {a cluster|a gaggle|a bunch} and purpose a ruleset of licences at it; all members of the group get that ruleset of licences and lose them once they leave. there is a few completely different cluster sorts supported – on-premise Active Directory Security teams, Azure AD-based Security teams, and Azure AD-based Dynamic Security teams.

The first 2 strategies square measure rather simple – calculate a way to add and take away users from the safety teams, and there is your licensing machine-driven. Dynamic Security teams, however, allow you to set the principles on what defines a member of the cluster.

Dynamic licences

Some directors can have an easy environment: produce one Dynamic Security cluster that adds all workers (for example, solely adding user accounts that have Associate in Nursing worker variety, or phone number) into the cluster, and people members get the complete suite of workplace 365 licences out there.

This additionally means that once Associate in Nursing account is clean up (deleted, or fields wiped) the user falls out of scope of the dynamic security cluster, loses their workplace 365 licence and gets marked as "suspended" to avoid accidental harmful deletions.

Sonia Cuff, a technology advisor and workplace Servers and Services participant, gave this further piece of advice:

Smaller businesses would possibly currently be tempted to seem underneath the hood at Azure Active Directory powering their workplace 365 authentication. however if they get their services via a Microsoft Cloud resolution supplier (CSP) agreement, there should be some manual intervention needed. Dynamic licensing will not mechanically provision new licenses from the CSP supplier, thus there'll got to be enough unused licenses out there to their tenant or they will ought to purchase a lot of.

It's a valid purpose, automation is nice however if left unmonitored or not done properly, you'll quickly exhaust your pool of obtainable licences.

For most others, though, licences are tight, and there'll be different a lot of specialised licenses (such as Power metallic element Pro) that square measure solely given to a couple of individuals.

The flexibility of this new resolution implies that the framework around however a user gets a licence is actually up to you. it'd be that anyone with "manager" in their title gets the facility metallic element professional License, or anyone from the promoting department gets access to Microsoft groups as a result of they are terribly up thus far with technology and have determined to not use emails as a type of internal communication.

The documentation for group-based licence management is already rather elaborate and thorough, thus if you are still doing licensing management the manual method, it's going to be worthy testing this resolution to induce back those tedious minutes from your day.

But it is not while not caveats. something publically preview will amendment unexpectedly, nested security teams are not supported, and you may got to pack up your manual licence assignments once your group-based licensing is complete.

And, finally, before jumping in and fixing this automation – have a trust however you are going to creator the licences and teams.

Why? as a result of automation that may not logical and/or clear to somebody aside from you is simply a brand new downside waiting to happen.

After all, you do not need to be referred to as back at brew o'clock on Fri evening simply because hour determined to enact Associate in Nursing end-of-week tidy-up to the CEO's workplace 365 account