Licensing Transfer

Question

Hello! I have a question about Licenses for Glint.

If my organization has for example 1,000 licenses in Glint and we have 2,000 employees. So we determine the 1,000 people we want to survey, if anyone previously had a license and would not anymore would anything happen to their data if moved to an inactive status? And if in the future we decide to reactivate someone's license does inactivating and reactivating cause any problems?

Answer 1

Dear Jennifer Dempsey,

Good day, and I appreciate the clear explanation of your concern. I understand that you want to confirm this carefully before moving users to inactive status, especially given that you are managing 1,000 Viva Glint licenses across a 2,000-employee population and would like to avoid losing any historical survey data.

As a forum moderator, I genuinely wish I could directly review your Viva Glint tenant, licensing setup, and employee data configuration to confirm the exact impact for your organization. Unfortunately, my role here is limited to providing general guidance based on Microsoft's published documentation.

From my research, individual user license assignment is not required for general Viva Glint usage. Instead, the licensing requirement is based on the number of active users in the Viva Glint app, and the total number of active licenses should be greater than or equal to the number of active users. Microsoft also notes that if active users exceed purchased licenses, one option is to remove excess active users by marking their status as "INACTIVE" in the employee data file. So in your example, if your organization has 1,000 Viva Glint licenses, you would generally need to manage the active Viva Glint user population so that no more than 1,000 users are active in Glint at any given time.

Regarding your data concern: marking someone as inactive is not the same as deleting the user. Microsoft's People feature documentation describes inactive users as people who are no longer in the organization or possibly on leave, and the People page is used to manage employee status, roles, and employee data. Because of that, moving a user to inactive should generally be treated as a status / licensing-population change, not the same as a deletion. However, for anything involving historical survey data, reporting continuity, or reactivation behavior, I strongly recommend confirming with Viva Glint Support or your Microsoft account team before making bulk changes.

A few best practices:

• Do not delete users unless you are certain about the data retention impact.
• Use INACTIVE status when you only want to remove users from the active licensed population.
• Keep the same Employee ID / unique identifier if you later reactivate someone.
• Avoid creating a new duplicate user record for the same employee.
• Test with a small group first before making a large update.
• Export or review relevant reports before bulk changes, if needed.

If the same employee is later reactivated and their employee identifier remains consistent, reactivation should generally be cleaner than deleting and recreating the user. If the employee is recreated with a different ID, that could potentially cause duplicate records or reporting/history issues.

For references: 

Viva Glint Licensing | Microsoft Learn

Use Viva Glint's People feature | Microsoft Learn

If you would like to be absolutely sure before applying the change at scale, I would recommend reaching out to your Microsoft representative or Viva Glint Support by submitting a support ticket to Microsoft for confirmation specific to your tenant. For detailed instructions on how to get support, please refer to Get support - Microsoft 365 admin.

I hope this information is helpful. Should you have any further questions or need additional assistance, please don't hesitate to reach out, I'm always happy to help. Wishing you a wonderful day ahead.

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