(Cloud) Tip of the Day: Assign custom licenses

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Today’s (Cloud) Tip…

In the Office 365 portal, you can assign users a license and remove (or disable) service plans such as Lync Online. Therefore, more granularly control what services are available to the user. I will show how you can do this using PowerShell.

  1. First, determine which license you want to assign the user and decide which plans you want to disable using the knowledge you learned yesterday.
  2. Second, set up how the license is going to look like by running the following similar command line…
    $options = New-MsolLicenseOptions -AccountSkuId AccountSkuId -DisabledPlans ServicePlanToDisable
    For example, if we want to assign a user an E3 license without Lync Online. Command line will look something like this…
    $options = New-MsolLicenseOptions -AccountSkuId woodgrovebank:ENTERPRISEPACK -DisabledPlans MCOSTANDARD
  3. Then, assign the user the license and custom options…
    Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName john@contoso.com -AddLicenses woodgrovebank:ENTERPRISEPACK -LicenseOptions $options

If the user already has the license and you want to disable Lync Online, then run the same command line in step 3 above without the AddLicenses parameter. Therefore, it will look something like this…

Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName john@contoso.com -LicenseOptions $options

You can also disable multiple plans by separating them with a comma (",")

$options = New-MsolLicenseOptions -AccountSkuId woodgrovebank:ENTERPRISEPACK -DisabledPlans MCOSTANDARD, OFFICESUBCRIPTION