Delegate365 changelog version 5.3-Auto licensing for existing users

Delegate365 version 5.2 has many new features (see here). In D365 version 5.3 we have a new feature for changing Office 365 licenses for users with already assigned OU’s. This article describes how this works in detail with an example, step by step.

Why did we add this feature? Well, a D365 customer had the requirement to auto assign Office 365 licenses. This could already be done in the previous versions of D365. But the peculiarity was that Office 365 licenses should be set gradually. So for example, in May users of an OU should get a license for SharePoint Online, in June for Yammer and in July for Exchange Online. This is a special use case which could only be done in D365 manually or partly, but not automatically. So we added this feature in the product.

Our sample starts with a demo Office 365 tenant where we have a Delegate365 tenant bound to. In the Office 365 tenant there are enough licenses available and some users are already existing (and assigned to an OU). We want to use Auto Assignment where users are assigned to an OU based on settings in their user properties automatically. In this demo we are Portal Admin in D365.

1. First we check if our test user Alan Steiner (the UPN is alans@somedomain.com, herein “alans”) has any licenses assigned. Currently there are no Office 365 licenses assigned.
   
   We plan to play around with E5 licenses in this scenario.
2. Now we check the OU’s in D365. We want that the OU “New York” will use Auto License Assignment. So we select New York and click “Edit licenses”.
   
   In the OU settings the switch “Use license auto assignment” must be set to Yes.
   This means that – if a user is assigned to the OU New York – he shall receive the selected licenses below (additionally to his existing licenses). Just to remind ourselves: It does not matter how a user OU is changed: manually by an admin or by a SyncOp (manually or automatically) – the result is the same.
   The second switch “Check existing OU assignments” is brand new with this version. If set to Yes, users who are already assigned to that OU New York are checked as well: If a user stays in this OU he will receive the selected licenses. If set to No (which is default), only users who are NEWLY assigned to that OU will receive the licenses. So this switch controls if licenses shall be set for users who are already assigned to an OU as well.
   
   In this scenario we want all users in New York to receive the Office 365 license for SharePoint Online (SPO) and Office Web Apps. So we select these licenses and Save the settings for New York.
3. Now we want to ensure that this user will automatically be assigned to a specific OU depending on their user properties.
   
   Here we set “Use user sync options” in the “users” section to Yes. Secondly, we select that the SyncOp must check the field department. So we select “Department” with priority “1” and click “Save” at the page bottom. This means that if SyncOp finds the name of any OU in the users department, this user will be assigned to that OU.
4. If a user is assigned to an OU and the OU license auto assignment is set to yes, that user will receive Office 365 licenses (as shown in 2). So we run the SyncOp manually to see the results immediately.
   
5. After the SyncOp was executed, let’s check the user’s licenses: So we open the users list, select “alans” and click “License”. As result of the SyncOp we should see that alans (who is still assigned to “New York”) has new licenses set: Both licenses of the OU New York have been added (as well as two dependent licenses).
   
   So we see that the automatic license assignment of existing users has worked.
6. Let’s add another test: In the OU “New York” we add another license for “Yammer”. Again, we leave “Check existing OU assignments” set to Yes, so that all users in “New York” shall receive that additional licenses.
   
   We click Save…
7. …and run the SyncOp again – as in 4).
8. Again we check the result of user alans. Now SyncOp has added the “Yammer” license (for ALL users in “New York”).
   

Important: As before, SyncOp only adds licenses for users and never removes licenses.

In our scenario, if we remove “Yammer” in “New York” and SyncOp runs, all already assigned licenses of the users assigned to New York will stay untouched (and the users will still have the Yammer license because it was assigned before). D365 never removes licenses so that it never will be the case that D365 is responsible for a possible reduced user functionality. The only exception is the menu “assign licenses” where Admins can set licenses manually as needed – this makes the removal of licenses possible.

We hope this short demo scenario describes the new functionality. With Delegate365 version 5.3 automatic license assignment of existing users is possible easily.