At the last 2 Microsoft Ignite there has been mentioned that soon Group-based licensing is comming to AzureAD. This can be done for EMS or Intune  licenses today. The new is that you automatic assign a licens to every product that you have in the cloud, O365, Windows 10, Dynamics, etc.

Last night I got this mail:

Dear Tenant Administrator,

This email provides important information that will impact your usage of our “group-based licensing” features in Azure Active Directory.

We are adding the ability to manage licenses in a much more flexible manner, and this functionality will be in public preview shortly – you can expect some exciting news in the next couple of weeks.

With the new functionality, you can assign licenses to groups and enable/disable plans for each group directly in the Azure portal.

If you have users to whom you assigned licenses through groups, but also disabled specific service plans in those licenses using PowerShell cmdlets, you will need to take specific action as follows:

1. If you need to remove a license from one of these users, you need to do the following:
   1. Remove the user from the group
   2. And, remove the user license by executing a PowerShell cmdlet, for example: Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName -RemoveLicenses

      More information about license management via PowerShell is available here.

2. After the public preview becomes available, any license customizations you have done to users with group licenses will no longer apply. If you still need specific service plans to be disabled for those users, you will need to update your group license settings. In the Azure portal, go to each licensed group and disable the applicable services. The Azure AD automation will apply those changes to all users in the group.

   At this point, you can consider removing any remaining directly assigned licenses from those users.

Please stay tuned for an official announcement of public preview soon. If you have questions about how these changes may impact you or are interested in trying the extended group based licensing functionality early, please contact us at [email protected].

Thank you,
The Azure Active Directory team