EMS license assignment to all users made easy

So you’ve purchased Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) licenses, now you need to assign them to users within your organization. A typical situation will be that you already have Office 365 licensed users, and it make sense that all of them will get EMS licenses too.

To achieve this, I would suggest using an Azure AD group with Dynamic Group membership. in this example, the group will include accounts that match ALL these conditions:

• Enabled users accounts
• Users with an email address
• Users with a-non empty Usage Location
• Synchronized user accounts

Within the Azure AD management portal (http://manage.windowsazure.com) navigate to your Active Directory tenant, and perform the following:

1. Create a group in Azure AD
2. Enable it for Dynamic Membership
3. Enter the advanced rule: (user.accountEnabled -eq “true”) AND (user.mail -ne $null) AND (user.usageLocation -ne $null) AND (user.dirSyncEnabled -eq true)
4. Assign EMS licenses to the Group

You can read more about Dynamic Group Membership here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/ad/archive/2015/03/09/attribute-based-dynamic-group-membership-for-azure-ad-premium-is-now-in-preview.aspx

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/active-directory-accessmanagement-groups-with-advanced-rules/

You can also assign licenses with the following methods:

1. Using the Office 365 Portal – like you would add Office 365 licenses.  This was made available late 2015 – http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoftintune/archive/2015/09/01/intune-and-ems-subscriptions-now-available-in-the-office-365-portal.aspx
2. Using Azure AD PowerShell – http://blogs.technet.com/b/treycarlee/archive/2013/11/01/list-of-powershell-licensing-sku-s-for-office-365.aspx ,you can use the following example to assign EMS licenses (with all options) only to users with an Office 365 E3 license:
   $EMSSKU = (Get-MsolAccountSku | ? { $_.AccountSkuID -like "*:EMS"})[0].accountSkuId
Get-MsolUser -All | ? { $_.licenses.accountsku.SkuPartNumber -eq "ENTERPRISEPACK"} | Set-MsolUserLicense -AddLicenses $EMSSKU
3. Azure AD Graph API – https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/ad/graph/api/users-operations#FunctionsandactionsonusersAssignalicensetoauser

Enjoy

ilantz