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Assign or revoke licenses at the same time to multiple users in a customer account

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Appropriate roles : Admin agent | Global admin | Helpdesk agent | Sales agent | User management admin

You can assign licenses and services to one user, or to multiple users at once, in a customer account. You can also revoke license assignments to users.

Partner Center tracks and shows all customer-owned license entitlements.

Assign licenses to multiple users

From the Partner Center menu, select Customers , and then choose a customer from the list.

Select Users and licenses .

Select the check box for two or more users from the list. (To select all users on the current page, select the check box at the top of the Users column.)

You can find and select users across multiple pages using the First , Previous , Next and Last tools.

Select the Selected Users link. The displayed list shows the selected users.

Select the Manage licenses link.

The Manage licenses page shows the list of license entitlements for the customer accounts, and the count of Available licenses for each product.

The check boxes in the Product column show the status of all selected users for the customer-entitled products:

When all selected users already have a license, the product's check box is filled.

If some of the selected users have a product license, the product's check box is partially filled.

If none of the selected users have a product license, the check box is clear.

Each selected user appears in a small box near the top of the page. Users appear in sorted order.

Select any link in the Assigned column to view a tooltip list showing the selected users that already have a license.

Any product without available licenses shows a Buy more link. You can purchase more licenses when customers require them.

Under Assign and revoke licenses , select product licenses for the new users.

For example, if none of the selected users have Office 365 Enterprise licenses and you want to add them, select the check box. You need enough licenses for each selected product.

Select Save . The Partner Center opens a Licenses updated confirmation page listing the users and their new licenses.

Some Microsoft products may not be available in certain locations. Other products are dependent on other products or services, or can't be assigned together to the same user. After you save, the confirmation page lists all users' results from successful license assignment, and any errors from the license assignment.

Revoke users' license assignments

Select the check box for one or more users from the list. (To select all users on the current page, select the check box at the top of the Users column.)

Page through the First , Previous , Next and Last tools to find and select other users. You can select across multiple pages.

After selecting the users, choose the Selected Users link. The displayed list shows only the selected users.

Under Assign and revoke licenses , clear the check boxes for products assigned to the users.

For example, if all of the selected users have Office 365 Enterprise licenses and you want to revoke them, select the check box to clear it.

Select Save .

• Manage permissions and licenses for users in a customer account
• Reinstate admin privileges for a customer's Azure CSP subscriptions

Additional resources

Microsoft Power BI Blog

Bulk assign licenses in office 365.

NOTE: Information good as of 7/21/2015 and is subject to change!

With the upcoming Power BI General Availability , you may be in a situation, with your Tenants, to assign a license to a bunch of licenses to your users.  This may be for the Free or Pro license. I wanted to show how you can do that within the Office 365 Admin Portal.

Within the O365 Admin Portal, we want to go to the Active Users screen which is under Users .

From there we can select the users that we want to assign the licenses to.

After your users are selected, click Edit on the right.

This will bring us to the Bulk edit users screen. We can just click next on the Details and Settings screen, unless you actually need to adjust something there.  What we care about is the Licenses landing page. On the Licenses landing page, I want to select Add to existing license assignments . Then select the license you want to assign, followed by Submit .

This should then show you that the change was successful.

Adam W. Saxton | Microsoft Business Intelligence Support – Escalation Services @GuyInACube | YouTube | Facebook.com\guyinacube

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Blog / Microsoft Entra ID / PowerShell

Bulk license assignment with the microsoft graph powershell sdk.

Table of Contents

Assigning Licenses to a Bunch of Users

A reader comment for the article covering how to assign licenses to user accounts with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK asked for an example showing how to read accounts from a CSV and assign licenses to those accounts. In other words, how to use PowerShell for bulk assignment of licenses to target user accounts. It’s the kind of thing people do when introducing new products to a tenant.

When Microsoft eventually releases Microsoft 365 Copilot for public consumption, I imagine that organizations willing to stump up the $30/user/month price will look for some sort of bulk assignment mechanism after they decide who gets Copilot licenses . Given that Copilot requires tenants to have Microsoft 365 enterprise licenses, they can use group-based licensing . That’s the best approach and the script discussed here is very much a do-it-yourself assignment mechanism for those who can’t use group-based licensing. Then again, it’s always nice to understand how things work so that you can create your own automation if necessary.

Finding User Accounts to Process

Conceptually, the processing steps are simple. The first step is to import details of target user accounts from a CSV file. Alternatively, you can use another mechanism to establish the set of target accounts. Suitable mechanisms include:

• Membership of a Microsoft 365 group (including dynamic groups). You need to filter the group membership to remove any guest accounts.
• Membership of a distribution list (including dynamic distribution lists). Distribution lists can include objects that can’t be targeted for license assignment, like public folders or mail users, so some filtering is necessary.
• Membership of an Entra ID administrative unit.
• User accounts are found by applying a filter to the Get-MgUser cmdlet .

For example, you could find a set of target accounts by looking for all the accounts located in a certain country:

Of course, using filters to find user accounts only works if account properties are populated with accurate information .

Creating a Target Users Array for Bulk License Assignment

The point is that it doesn’t matter how you generate a set of target accounts. All that’s important is that your script provides a set of identifiers that can be used for license assignment. Those identifiers can be account object identifiers (GUIDs) or user principal names.

For this example, because so many people use CSV files to point to target accounts, that’s what I do in the example script:

The data contained in the $Users array holds the user principal name and display name of the accounts we want to assign licenses to:

Assigning Licenses to Each User Account

The job’s half done when the set of target user accounts is available. After all, the only thing that’s left to do is to run the Set-MgUserLicense cmdlet for each account. Well, that’s certainly true if you want to perform a one-off operation, but it’s best to build some checks and balances in any script code that might be reused.

To illustrate what I mean, examine the processing displayed in Figure 1.

The script:

• Finds the subscribed products (SKUs) known to the tenant and selects the SKUs that still have some available licenses.
• Presents the list of SKUs to the user to allow them to choose which license to assign to the target users.
• Checks that sufficient available licenses exist to assign to all the target users.
• Checks that each target user does not already have the license in their assigned set.
• If the license is not present for a user, attempt to assign the license to the account (note: if your tenant uses restricted administrative units , only accounts holding administrator roles for the administrative units can assign licenses to member accounts).
• Captures details of the success or failure of the license assignment and records the information in a list object (Figure 2).
• Reports details of the processing, including how many successful and failed license assignments occurred.

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More Improvements Possible

I spent a happy afternoon playing with the script to anticipate some of the situations that you might encounter during license assignment operations, but I think I barely scratched the surface. There is much more that could be done to expand the script to handle different conditions, such as:

• Assigning multiple product SKUs at one time.
• Disabling service plans that the organization doesn’t want people to use from product SKUs. For instance, the organization might decide that Viva Engage (Yammer) isn’t required and therefore disables the Viva Engage Core service plan in SKUs like Office 365 E3 and E5. That’s possible, but if you disable Viva Engage, you lose some Teams functionality, like the Q&A app in meetings.
• Share the results of the license assignment processing with other people via email or Teams.

Please feel free to amend the script I wrote ( available for download from GitHub ) to add your ideas. I might disagree with your suggestions, but at least we can have a discussion.

Bulk License Assignment Automated Your Way

PowerShell makes it possible to automate operations the way you want things done rather than the way Microsoft thinks things should be done. That’s its big advantage and it’s the core reason why every Microsoft 365 administrator should be passingly fluent in PowerShell.

If you attend The Experts Conference in Atlant a (Sept 19-20, 2023), make sure to come to the Great PowerShell Script-Off to have some fun and support the contestants as they struggle with the challenges we’ll set for them. All the challenges are common Microsoft 365 tenant automation tasks, so you might even learn something too!

About the Author

Tony Redmond

I keep getting this error. I ran it with just changing the filename to mine & even tried the snippet above. Same error

WARNING: One or more headers were not specified. Default names starting with “H” have been used in place of any missing headers.

Cannot index into a null array. At line:76 char:5 + Write-Host (“{0} users are to receive licenses but there are only … + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (:) [], RuntimeException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : NullArray

Looks like the Import-CSV from the file pointed to with $InputFile didn’t bring in any user accounts to process.

Hi Tony, thank you for the very intersting script. I’m trying to use only a part of it as my task is a one shot group add of licences, but I am stuck with an error. Here is the script I adapted: $InputFile = “c:\Users\damien.hartmann\Documents\comptes.csv” [array]$Users = Import-CSV $InputFile ForEach ($User in $Users) { $License = Set-MgUserLicense -UserId $User.UPN -Addlicenses @{SkuId = ‘$18181a46-0d4e-45cd-891e-60aabd171b4e’} } Would you by chance see where I made a mistake?

Your SKUID has a $ sign in the first character. That makes it an invalid GUID

Thanks, but I still get the same error message: Set-MgUserLicense : Impossible de lier l’argument au paramètre « UserId », car il s’agit d’une chaîne vide. Au caractère C:\Users\damien.hartmann\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\ajouter_licences_v3.ps1:3 : 66 + … r in $Users) { $License = Set-MgUserLicense -UserId $User.UPN -Addlic … + ~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : InvalidData : (:) [Set-MgUserLicense], ParameterBindingValidationException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : ParameterArgumentValidationErrorEmptyStringNotAllowed,Set-MgUserLicense (sorry for the French)

Finally I managed to make it work, thanks again!

Hey can you send me the code you used

Hi Tony, I found the script, whoch is working fine for me. Thank you

Hi Tony, The arcticle is elaborate an dvery helpfull, please share the Script that does the output shown in powershell above

The script is available in GitHub and is linked to in the article.

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Assigning licenses for Office 365 users using PowerShell

The following is a comparison between adding licenses to Office 365 users with Windows PowerShell and ADManager Plus

Windows PowerShell

Steps to manage licenses of office 365 users using powershell:.

• Identify the Office 365 tenant from which you want to retrieve the report.
• Identify the cmdlets you need to fetch the report.
• Compile the script.
• Execute it in Windows PowerShell.

Sample Windows PowerShell script:

Admanager plus, steps to add licenses for office 365 users:.

• Select Office 365 -> License Management ->Assign/Remove licenses
• Select Add licenses option, choose the desired license(s), and User Location from the drop down list.
• Choose the Office 365 account and its users, and click Apply.

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Following are the limitations to manage licenses of Office 365 users using native tools like Windows PowerShell:

• With additional filters, the script will get longer and more complicated.
• Troubleshooting these scripts requires extensive AD and scripting expertise.

ADManager Plus can help you assign licenses of Office 365 users in a simple and intuitively designed UI.

Assign or remove Office 365 licenses for multiple accounts in one go with ADManager Plus.

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Bulk Assign Licenses in Office 365 Using PowerShell

If you manage an Office 365 tenant, you are probably familiar with assigning licenses to provision services for users. That process is pretty straightforward for a single user.

But how do you do it for a hundred or thousand people in your organization? PowerShell.

First, you will need to connect to Office 365 via PowerShell. If you haven’t done this before,  follow these steps to install the prerequisites.

To connect to O365/MSOnline, use the following command:

Import-Module MSOnline Connect-MsolService

You will be prompted for credentials – this needs to be a user with at least user management role permissions, but most operations in this module will require global admin permissions.

Next, you will need to get a list of licenses available in your tenant. This can be viewed easily in the admin portal under Billing, but is identified by the AccountSkuID in PowerShell. To generate a list of what is available and assigned, run the following command:

Get-MsolAccountSku

The results will contain your tenant name and sku and looks something like this:

If you’re using E1/E3 licenses, they will have a name like “tenantname:ENTERPRISEPACK” or “tenantname:STANDARDPACK”.

Now that you know what you have available to assign, you need to determine which users will be assigned a license. This can be a difficult task, especially in larger organizations.

If you’re lucky enough to just assign all users in your tenant a license, your process will be relatively simple. Prior to assigning licenses, you must assign a location. This is a required field and is done by country. This will essentially provision the Exchange Online mailbox in the proper region and ensure that it follows all local laws, etc.

To assign the US location to a single user, you would use the following command:

Set-MsolUser [email protected] $upn -UsageLocation US

All countries follow the 2-letter ISO code standard –  a list of those can be found here .

Now, we’re using PowerShell – we want to actually  bulk assign licenses and locations, not just do single users. To assign the US location to all of your tenant users, use the following command:

Get-MsolUser -All | Set-MsolUser -UsageLocation US

To verify the results, use the following command:

Get-MsolUser -All | Select DisplayName,UsageLocation

Once the location is assigned either through the admin portal or PowerShell, you can assign licenses. The following command would assign an E3 license to all users in the US only:

Get-MsolUser -All -UsageLocation ‘US’ | Set-MsolUserLicense -AddLicenses “tenantname:ENTERPRISEPACK”

There are several other properties that may be useful in narrowing down the scope of users to bulk assign licenses to. Use the following command to view only users that do not have a license assigned:

Get-MsolUser -UnlicensedUsersOnly

This command will assign licenses only to users with a specific domain name:

Get-MsolUser -All -DomainName ‘pagosa.ai’ | Set-MsolUserLicense -AddLicenses “tenantname:ENTERPRISEPACK”

A full list of properties to use with Get-MsolUser   can be found here .

What if it isn’t this straightforward in your organization? You may have several countries, types of licenses, or maybe you want to assign licenses in batches. Sometimes it’s just easiest to assign both the location and license at the same time from a CSV file – this is usually the preferred method in larger organizations. This operation can be done with a simple PowerShell script ( download it here ):

The above script references users in a CSV file containing users’ UPN, location, and license to assign. It looks like this ( download it here ):

You will need to modify the script to use the correct path to the CSV file.

If you need to generate a list of users in your O365 tenant, including their UPN, location, and whether or not a license is currently assigned, you can use the following command:

Get-MsolUser | select-object DisplayName,UserPrincipalName,UsageLocation,IsLicensed

Your results will look similar to this:

To export the same data to a CSV file, add a bit more to the end:

Get-MsolUser | select-object DisplayName,UserPrincipalName,UsageLocation,IsLicensed | export-csv C:\pathtofile\o365export.csv -notype