How to Assign an Office 365 License

How to Configure Office 365 Licenses

To enable the various features of Office 365, you need to assign a license to your user accounts.

The most prominent feature to provision is an Exchange Online mailbox. This is done by assigning an Exchange Online license.

The following sections will show you how to assign (or remove) Office 365 licenses from your users.

Using Easy365Manager to Manage Office 365 Licenses

The easiest way to manage Office 365 licenses is using Easy365Manager.

Easy365Manager is a snap-in to Active Directory Users & Computers that allows you to manage Office 365 licenses (and mailboxes) directly from AD user properties.

With Easy365Manager, you simply open up user properties in AD Users & Computers, select the Office 365 tab and configure your Office 365 licenses:

Create an Office 365 mailbox using Easy365Manager

To try this yourself, download the fully functional 30-day trial.

The installation only takes a few minutes:

Using the Office 365 Web Consoles to Manage Office 365 Licenses

Without Easy365Manager, your user management will be a mixed bag of AD Users & Computers, several Office 365 web consoles, and PowerShell.

Microsoft offers multiple consoles that can be used to manage Office 365 licenses.

The Microsoft 365 Admin Center

To manage Office 365 licenses using the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, select the user account and click on Licenses and Apps:

Office 365 license management

The Azure AD Portal

Another way to manage Office 365 licenses is using the Azure AD Portal.

Select Users, select a user account, and click on Licenses:

Using PowerShell to Manage Office 365 Licenses

To manage Office 365 licenses using PowerShell, you can use either the MSOnline Module or the Azure AD Module.

Both modules can be downloaded and installed from the PowerShell repository.

To add a license to a user, you need to select the licensing plan and deselect any service plans you want to exclude.

(read this article for a complete overview of Office 365 licenses)

The following sample code will assign the Enterprise Pack license with a few plans disabled.

$LO = New-MsolLicenseOptions -AccountSkuId "skrubbeltrang:ENTERPRISEPACK" -DisabledPlans "SHAREPOINTWAC", "SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE"
Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName tbr@skrubbeltrang.com -LicenseOptions $LO

Summary

There are many ways to skin a cat, and the same goes for managing Office 365 licenses.

If you want to make your life easy (or simplify the daily tasks of your helpdesk), take a look at Easy365Manager.

You’ll find a list of features here.

Additionally, Easy365Manager allows you to remove your on-premises Exchange Server, which gives you 100% protection from future zero-day exploits like Hafnium.

Alternatively, you can use a mix of the native Office 365 web consoles or PowerShell for Office 365 settings. At the same time, you must keep in mind that certain properties are authoritative in your on-premises Active Directory.