Working with Office 365 User Licenses

 

Summary: Use Windows PowerShell to Manage Office 365 using Windows PowerShell cmdlets, scripts, and batch processes.

As we noted previously, there are plenty of things you can do with the Azure cmdlets; for example, this command returns information about the number of Office 365 licenses you have, as well as the number of licenses you have yet to distribute:

Get-MsolAccountSku

That’s going to return data similar to this:

AccountSkuId                 ActiveUnits   WarningUnits  ConsumedUnits
------------                 -----------   ------------   ------------
litwareinc:ENTERPRISEPACK    25            0              25

In our sample data, the litwareinc domain has been issued 25 licenses (ActiveUnits) and all 25 licenses are currently assigned to users (ConsumedUnits).

That’s good. Of course, even better would be the ability to see the licenses which have been assigned to an individual user. Without explaining all the details, here’s how we can find the licenses currently assigned to Ken Myer:

Get-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName "kenmyer@litwareinc.onmicrosoft.com" | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Licenses | Select-Object -ExpandProperty ServiceStatus

OK, we’ll offer a cursory explanation, because this is definitely a more-complicated command. In this command, we first use Get-MsolUser to return information for the user kenmyer@litwareinc.onmicrosoft.com. We then pipe that information to the Select-Object cmdlet, and use the ExpandProperty parameter to “expand” the Licenses property. We need to do that because Licenses is a multi-valued property; that means it contains multiple values (in this case, multiple licenses), and we want to make sure we are working with all the licenses. We then pipe the license information to Select-Object and expand the ServiceStatus property in order to get detailed information about each individual license.

Note

Take a look at this article on multi-property values if that cursory explanation proved to be no explanation at all.

When all is said and done, we should get back something similar to this:

ServicePlan                      ProvisioningStatus
-----------                      ------------------
YAMMER_ENTERPRISE                None
RMS_S_ENTERPRISE                 Success
OFFICESUBSCRIPTION               Success
MCOSTANDARD                      Success
SHAREPOINTWAC                    Success
SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE             Success
EXCHANGE_S_ENTERPRISE            Success

Admittedly, it might not be obvious at first glance what’s going on here. Fortunately, it’s not as obtuse as it might seem. The ServicePlan property contains a collection of licenses (the licenses available in your organization depend on the Office 365 plan that you purchased). The values in our ServicePlan property equate to the following:

Index Number Service Plan Product

0

YAMMER_ENTERPRISE

Yammer

1

RMS_S_ENTERPRISE

Windows Azure Active Directory

2

OFFICESUBSCRIPTION

Office Professional Plus

3

MCOSTANDARD

Lync

4

SHAREPOINTWAC

Office Web Apps

5

SHAREPOINTNETERPRISE

SharePoint

6

EXCHANGE_S_ENTERPRISE

exchange

In turn, the ProvisioningStatus property tells us whether the license has been assigned or not:

  • None means that no license has ever been assigned.

  • Success means that the license is assigned.

  • Disabled means that the license was assigned but has since been disabled.

As you can see, Ken Myer has been assigned all the available licenses except for Yammer.

Note

What’s the Index Number in the preceding table? The index number is another identifier for the service plan. Based on good old-fashioned computer programming, the first item in a collection like this is assigned index number 0. Thus YAMMER_ENTERPRISE has the index number 0. The second item in the collection is assigned index number 1, the third item is assigned index number 2, and so on. As we’ll see in a moment, these numbers can be used to do things like show you all the users who have a Yammer license, or all the users who don’t have a Yammer license.

So can we change these licensing assignments; for example, can we disable Ken’s ability to use Exchange and Lync Online? You bet we can. Again, we won’t bother to explain how this all works; that’s a topic for another day. However, in Office 365 you can manage licenses (in part anyway) by indicating which licenses should be disabled. That’s done by creating a new licensing options object, like this one:

$disabledLicenses = New-MsolLicenseOptions -AccountSkuId "litwareinc:ENTERPRISEPACK" -DisabledPlans "MCOSTANDARD","EXCHANGE_S_ENTERPRISE"

What we’ve done here is simply say that, for the litwareinc domain (which has purchased the Enterprise licensing pack) we want to disable two plans: Lync (MCOSTANDARD) and Exchange (EXCHANGE_S_ENTERPRISE). Note that this command, by itself, doesn’t disable these licenses for any user. Instead, it creates a generic user license in which both Lync and Exchange have been disabled. We can then take that generic user license and assign it to an actual person:

Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName "kenmyer@litwareinc.onmicrosoft.com" -LicenseOptions $disabledLicenses

If we run that command and then take a second look at Ken’s user licenses we should see something that looks like this:

ServicePlan                      ProvisioningStatus
-----------                      ------------------
YAMMER_ENTERPRISE                None
RMS_S_ENTERPRISE                 Success
OFFICESUBSCRIPTION               Success
MCOSTANDARD                      Disabled
SHAREPOINTWAC                    Success
SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE             Success
EXCHANGE_S_ENTERPRISE            Disabled

Voila! Both Exchange and Lync Online have been disabled.

Viewing Office 365 Licensing Information for Multiple Users

See Also

Using Windows Azure Active Directory to Manage Office 365