LICENSING, ADOPTION, AND BUSINESS VALUE
Assigning and unassigning licenses
that work with M365, and often other non- Microsoft software-as-a-service portals as well. Equally important and often forgotten is a process which deallocates licenses when a user leaves the organization or changes roles within the organization. Chargebacks Many organizations implement a chargeback system where software license costs are allocated to specific business units or cost centers. In this model, a business unit, office, regional, or country administrator is provided with a purchased pool of licenses, for which the respective entity is charged, and then is responsible for allocating these licenses to individuals within the business or geographical unit. This administrator is likely also responsible for “right sizing” the overall license pool. The native Microsoft tools do not directly support this type of chargeback administration. If your organization requires detailed chargeback capabilities, you should investigate third-party tools.
Establishing an automated process to assign groups of licenses based on specific roles helps standardize capabilities and streamlines training and adoption processes. Further, combining license and policy assignment helps improve an organizations security profile. Various Microsoft admin centers provide a graphical user interface (GUI) that is suitable for assigning licenses to an individual or small group of users; however, at scale the GUI approach is slow and error prone. And while some, like the M365 Admin Center, allow you to upload a CSV file to setup basic user information for a group of users, for more complex or large-scale operations, PowerShell, leveraging the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK, is often required. PowerShell scripting, like many things Microsoft creates, is powerful, but it is not simple and starts to create a support problem as the scripts evolve! While you can learn the basics in a few weeks to months, proficiency typically takes 3 to 6 months of consistent learning and practice. For automating license (and policy) assignment at scale, many organizations look to third-party tools
11
e n a b l eUC
Powered by FlippingBook