M365 Business Premium and Windows 11

Question

M365 Business Premium and Windows 11

Anonymous

Greetings,

I couldn't find any answers regarding this topic at MS Forums. I hope you guys can share your experience.

We have a customer with a mix of Windows 11 Home and Windows 11 Pro Notebooks which they bought on their own. They're using M365 Business Premium subscription and decided that they want to perform an Azure Ad join via Entra-ID for all devices. From what I understand the M365 Business Premium subscription contains a full Windows 11 Business license.

Needles to say that everything works without any issues on the Windows 11 Pro devices. On the other hand we have 4-5 Windows 11 Home devices with strange behaviour after I performed the Azure AD join...

What I did:

> I upgraded Windows 11 Home to Windows 11 Pro with the generic Windows 11 Pro Key easily accesible on the internet (just to have the option to perform Azure AD join via Entra-ID)

> Then I joind the devices to Azure AD via Entra ID and migrated all data and seetings from the old local account to the M365 account which the user is using now to log into Windows 11

If I check Windows System settigs and it says that Windows 11 Business is active **** but it also says that Windows is not activated with the error code 0xC004C003.

After checking MS Forums and Reddit I still couldn't find the answer for my question:

Does the M365 Business Premium subscription contain a full Windows 11 License?

Is it possible to activate an unactivated Windows 11 Pro with the M365 Business Premium sub by performing Azure AD join via Entra ID or do I need to buy a Windows 11 Pro license?

The fun part is that I'm testing it right now with a virtual machine on my own PC. I installed a completely unlicensed Windows 11 Home, upgraded it with the Windows 11 Pro generic key and performed a Azure AD join with my own Entra-ID licensed with M365 Business Premium. I see no issue on my VM.

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Answer 1

Dear Hermann Strebel1,

Good day! Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community.

To answer your question, the Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscription does not include a full Windows 11 license. However, it does include the ability to upgrade Windows 10 Pro devices to Windows 11 Pro. If you have Windows devices running Windows 7 Pro, Windows 8 Pro, or Windows 8.1 Pro, your Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscription entitles you upgrade those devices to Windows Pro 10. However, the Microsoft 365 Business Premium does not include free upgrade rights from Windows 10 or 11 Home to Windows 10 or 11 Pro. You can refer to Upgrade Windows devices to Windows 10 or 11 Pro - Microsoft 365 Business Premium | Microsoft Learn

Regarding the issue with the Windows 11 Home devices, it is possible that the generic Windows 11 Pro key you used to upgrade the devices is not valid or has been blocked by Microsoft. Also, the error code 0xC004C003 occurs when a licensing code component tries to access a registry hive without proper access. A resulting access denied error causes the product key not to be extracted correctly. This could be the reason why the devices are showing the error code. Therefore, to activate Windows 11 Pro on these devices, you will need to purchase a valid Windows 11 Pro license. Once you have a valid license, you can use it to activate Windows 11 Pro on the devices and then perform the Azure AD join via Entra ID.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any further questions or concerns.

Thank you for your precious time. Have a nice day.

Sincerely,

Libeamlak | Microsoft Community Moderator

Answer 2

Anonymous

Understood. Thank you!

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M365 Business Premium and Windows 11

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