Tracking, analyzing, and managing licenses is crucial in today’s ever-changing licensing environment. Reporting on Office 365 licenses is key for organizations to gain detailed insights into how licenses are being used, user behavior, past patterns, and, ultimately, the expenses.
In a nutshell, a solid Office 365 license reporting strategy will help your business make smart choices, reduce Office 365 licensing expenses, and meet vendor agreement requirements.
Running a license report from Office 365 is a straightforward process that provides essential insights into license allocation and usage. Typically, these are the steps taken:
The Office 365 Admin Center comes with built-in tools that streamline license management. Leveraging these tools provides several benefits:
Generating an Office 365 license report through PowerShell involves connecting to the Office 365 services using PowerShell commands, and the module to use is the Microsoft.Graph PowerShell SDK! If you do not have it yet, you will need to install it from the PowerShell gallery using the following cmdlet:
Before you can retrieve license information, you need to establish a connection to your Microsoft 365 tenant. Now open PowerShell and run the following command:
This will prompt you to enter your Microsoft 365 admin credentials. After successful authentication, you will be connected to your Microsoft 365 tenant.
There are two cmdlets we will play around with as we want to report on users. The first one is Get-MgUser which returns us information on users, and the second one is Get-MgUserLicenseDetail which returns us information about the licenses assigned to a certain user.
For example, if I wanted to view the licenses assigned to a specific user, I would use the following example:
As we build our more advanced script, we probably want to filter some users out, for example unlicensed users and guests. So, in the following example we get all our users that are internal to our organizations, and that have a license assigned. This will also output the number of licensed users you have in your organization.
You have probably noticed I have an Assigned licenses in there, as yes, we could get the information about Assigned licenses directly from the Get-MgUser cmdlet, but we get an ID , and not an actual name, so it’s not super user friendly! You can find out what the ID is by using the Get-MGSubscribedSku PowerShell cmdlet which will return you the ID, as well as the SkuPartNumbe
But now if you are a new user, you might not know all those names, for example, what is Enterprise Pack? Microsoft has an Excel file that actually does the mapping between the GUID, the friendly name, and all the services included in a license over here.
PS: Once you look at the file, you will realize whoever told you Microsoft licensing is simple, lied to you as there are over 5000 lines in that CSV File!
Now that we know all of this information, how do we put it all together in a nicer report? This could all be in one line but I formatted it on multiple lines for easier viewing in a blog post:
If you want to export your report to CSV, you can run something like this:
And this is the result in Excel. You will notice I also added the Username to this example:
To generate a comprehensive license report, it is best to record the license information in a structured format. You can export the license information to a CSV file using the following command:
Replace “C:\Path\To\LicenseReport.csv” with the desired path and filename for your license report. This command will export the user’s display name and licenses to a CSV file.
The license information retrieved in Step 2 may contain cryptic identifiers. To make the report more user-friendly, you can map these identifiers to user-readable license names.
Run the following command to display the license names instead of identifiers:
This script will update the license report CSV file with human-friendly license names.
If you want to include service details in your license report, you can retrieve the information using the following command:
This will display the service name and provisioning status for each license in your Microsoft 365 tenant. You can then proceed to further customize this result and include it in your license report if desired.
By following these steps, you will be able to generate a comprehensive license report for Office 365 using PowerShell.
Navigating the intricate landscape of Office 365 licensing requires a strategic approach that aligns with organizational goals and user needs.
To help you get there, our Senior Software Engineer, Bojan Grubić has created the Manage Office 365 licenses the right way article. It will guide you in ensuring that the right licenses are allocated to the right users, streamlining license assignments, and optimizing costs.
To achieve optimal management of Office 365 licenses, you must first identify licenses that aren’t being used or are being underutilized. By taking a proactive approach, you can save money by assigning these licenses to users who require them.
Administrators can then track user activity and consumption patterns, allowing them to make better decisions regarding licensing investments and eliminating any unnecessary expenses.
To export a list of licensed users in Office 365, you can utilize the Office 365 admin portal. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
1. Sign in to the Office 365 admin portal using your admin credentials.
2. Navigate to the “Admin centers” section and click on “Admin centers” to expand the list.
3. Click on “Users” to access the user management dashboard.
4. In the left-hand menu, click on “Active users” to view a list of all active users in your organization.
5. To see the license usage and history for a specific user, click on their name in the list.
6. On the user details page, scroll down to the “Product licenses” section.
7. Here, you will see a list of the licenses assigned to the user, including the license name, status, and assigned date.
8. To export this list, click on the “Download” button at the top right corner of the “Product licenses” section.
9. Choose the desired format (CSV, Excel, or PDF) for the exported file and save it to your preferred location.
To check your Office 365 license count, you can follow these steps:
To export a list of licensed users in Office 365, you can use the Microsoft 365 admin center. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
In the “Customize columns” dialog box, you can select the columns you want to include by checking the corresponding boxes.
Click “Apply” when you’re done. Now, click on the “Download” button in the initial dialog box. A CSV file will be downloaded to your computer, containing the list of active users and their assigned licenses.
Syskit Point offers powerful features that will help you simplify license management in your Office 365 administration.
With Syskit Point, you can efficiently manage your Office 365 licenses and gain detailed reports on license usage that contain valuable information such as active and inactive users, license counts, and much more.
By leveraging these reports, you can identify licenses that are not being fully utilized, optimize your license budget, and maintain compliance with your licensing agreements.