Migrating from Microsoft Group Based Licensing to Cayosoft Administrator direct assignments

Summary: This article describes the procedure to follow if you want to migrate a scope of users from Microsoft Group Based Licensing (GBL) assignment to a direct assignment model using Cayosoft automation rules and Web actions.

Applies to: Cayosoft Administrator 8.0.0 and laterю

Overview

A user can have the same license assigned by both GBL and direct assignment at the same time. This fact is key in understanding how to migrate a user away from Microsoft's Group Based Licensing without service interruption.

Simply removing the user from the group to revoke the existing license and then re-assigning the same license directly will lead to both interruption and information loss. For example, any assigned phone numbers will be removed along with the license and will not be re-provisioned when the relevant license is reassigned.

This means that the direct license assignment has to be done before removing the user from the Microsoft license group.

The difficulty in assigning a license directly over an existing assignment in Cayosoft Administrator is tied to speed optimization logic that automatically skips over any license assignments that do not change the license plans and apps currently assigned. With this in mind, below is the procedure to migrate a scope of users away from Microsoft's GBL.

Configuration

1. Configure a licensing automation rule like AD Users | Enforce License on a scope of users to migrate using the query section;

   It is recommended to test this procedure on 1-2 users before running on a larger scope;

2. Configure the license assignment of this rule to mirror the group assignment almost exactly, but change a single service. For example, exclude a single non-vital app. This slight difference will mean that the automation rule will assign the licenses directly along with the group-bases licenses;

3. Run the automation rule on your test users and confirm that it ran successfully;

   This can be done, for example, in the Azure Active Directory portal which shows the license assignment paths of each user:

   

4. Once you are sure that the test user has the licenses assigned directly, you can remove them from the membership of the license group:

   • Remove group membership;

   • In the Azure portal, run "Reprocess" on the test user (or on the entire group if this was done on many users);

   • Confirm that the test users are now licenses only through the direct assignment path;

5. Run the automation rule on all users in scope of the target group being migrated;

6. Remove all these users from the license group after the rule is successfully finished;

7. Change the rule to re-enable the unassigned service disabled in step 2 and re-run the rule to apply final license to all users.

NOTE: You can do the same procedure on a single user using the Cayosoft AdministratorWeb Portal > Office 365 License action. Just check or uncheck a single checkbox on an existing user and save to add a direct license assignment along with the GBL assignment.