Experts Inside Licensing Manager Docs / docs / classic licensing
Classic Licensing
Classic licensing is the core day-to-day workflow for tenant admins and tenant operators.
What you can do
- Assign a license SKU to a user.
- Remove a license SKU from a user.
- Assign a license SKU to a group.
- Remove a license SKU from a group.
How assignment and removal works
The product uses the same operation pattern for both actions:
- Assign: adds the selected SKU.
- Remove: removes the selected SKU.
For assign actions, service plan exclusions may be included. For remove actions, service plan exclusions are not used.
User-level vs group-level management
- User-level assignment is a direct license assignment to one identity.
- Group-level assignment applies to members through group membership.
- A user can appear as licensed because of:
- a direct assignment, or
- an inherited/group-based assignment.
In the UI, assignment provenance is shown so operators can see whether the seat is direct or group/inherited.
Important behavior to know
- Direct user licenses can be removed directly from the user context.
- Group/inherited licenses must be changed at the group level (or by membership changes), not removed as a direct user license.
- After a successful assign/unassign action, the tenant state is reconciled quickly and analytics are refreshed asynchronously.
Access and prerequisites
- You need tenant-scoped role access as
TenantAdminorTenantOperator. - Microsoft Graph app permissions and tenant consent must be configured for license management.
- Valid user/group IDs and valid SKU IDs are required for updates.
Common validation and error cases
- Invalid action or malformed IDs return request validation errors.
- Unsupported payload combinations (for example, plan exclusions on remove) are rejected.
- Upstream Microsoft Graph errors are surfaced with mapped API responses.