Assign Exchange license to a tenant as a global admin

Question

I'm setting up tenants in the maze of Azure and Microsoft Admin Centre. I set up myself as an admin and assigned a couple of domains and email licensing. All good for myself, but I'm struggling with tenants.

I've set a tenant up, confirmed the domain, added a user. Logged in to Admin Centre as myself (the global user account) and then gone to Purchase Services and bought a license. Now I want to assign the purchased Exchange Basic license to my tenant. I would have thought I could purchase licenses as the global admin and assign them to tenants in other organisations, but I can only assign that license to people in my organisation.

I could give Admin Centre access to my tenant, log in as them, and purchase a license, but would that not then send the tenant billing invoices? I'm sure I'm missing something. I must be able to purchase as a global admin then assign to tenants?

Answer 1

I think to do so you have to go trough partner.microsoft.com be registered and have linked your tenants to your partnership, in this way you can manager all your tenants.

Or you can use a third party license reseller that is able to resell licenses directly to your tenant (without you having to do it).

Best regards,

Answer 2

Hi Kris,

If you are logged to your "tenant" (https://portal.office.com) with a global admin account, you can then assign licenses directly to users (admin or not).

You can control your current available licenses trough Billing>Licences and then assign them trough the "Users" tab.

I hope this helps.

Answer 3

Hi Nil,

Thanks for taking the time to help. I made the tenant a global admin so I could log into portal.office.com under their username. This would allow me to purchase licenses in to their account and assign them, then revoke Global admin rights, which I don't want them to have.

Maybe this is the way it is done, but I thought as a Global Admin, I could buy licenses under my Global Admin account then assign them to tenants. This way, all the billing and admin would be in one place rather than logging in to hundreds of different tenants and giving them temporary global rights.

I'm sure I'm missing something simple here so I can just use one Global Admin to administer all of my tenants and grant licenses.

Answer 4

Thanks, Nil.

Got my head around it all now. I was thinking like a reseller account. I still can't really understand the benefit of having a tenant if I can't provide services to them like a landlord. Look like the temporary global admin > purchase > revoke global admin is the way to do it.

Thanks again. Kris