How do i assign Office 365 licenses while disabling sub-license options

October 17

Using PowerShell to Specify License Plans in Office 365

by  Todd Klindt  on 10/17/2016 2:59 PM
Category: PowerShell; Office 365

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten a chance to get my hands dirty with some good old PowerShell and last week I got that opportunity. Here is the whole fabulous tale. 
A customer wanted some helping scripting out their migration to Office 365. They already had directory synchronization set up between their Windows AD and Azure AD. They are slowly rolling out Office 365 to their users, 10 or 20 at a time, and they are rolling out the services gradually. They’re starting with SharePoint Online. They’ll eventually migrate to Exchange Online, and of course they’ll never use Yammer.  Since they’re doing it in batches, PowerShell is the perfect tool to license up their users, but there was a snag. Adding a license to a user in PowerShell is easy, and it’s easy to apply individual license service plans to a user in the UI, but it’s not easy to do service plans in PowerShell, until today.
The Problem
Here is what the customer was trying to do:

We’re all familiar with using Set-MsolUserLicense to assign licenses to users. The problem is that it assigns all the service plans to the user. In our case we don’t want the user to be licensed for Exchange or Yammer, among other things. Figuring out how to combine the flexibility of the UI, with the the looping and scriptablity of PowerShell is what we’re after.
The Solution
Fortunately, PowerShell had the answer for us. With very little work I discovered the New-MsolLicenseOptions cmdlet. This does exactly what I was looking for. However, using it was a little tricky, so I thought I’d write it up.
The first step is to license one user in the UI exactly how you want all of your users to be licensed. We will essentially use this as a template. In our case, the screenshot above is our template. We will use PowerShell to see how that user is configured. I used this command:

(Get-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName EnricoC@MOD873457.onmicrosoft.com).licenses

This gave me all the licenses that user has. We can use Get-MsolAccountSku to see which licenses are which, but we need to drill down one level deeper. We need to discover the service plan names of the Enterprise SKU. From the screenshot above we can see that it’s the first license listed. Because these lists are zero based, the first one is 0 and we get to it like this:

(Get-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName EnricoC@MOD873457.onmicrosoft.com).licenses[0].servicestatus

And it looks like this:

We can see the Service Plans that show as disabled are the same ones that are off in our first screenshot. More importantly it gives us the Service Plan names that PowerShell will need to use when setting our options. Here is how we set the options:

$opts = New-MsolLicenseOptions -AccountSkuId MOD873457:ENTERPRISEPREMIUM –DisabledPlans “LOCKBOX_ENTERPRISE”,”EXCHANGE_ANALYTICS”,”YAMMER_ENTERPRISE”,”EXCHANGE_S_ENTERPRISE”

Now that we have that, we can license our users in the normal way with one additional step to set the options.
For completeness, here is the whole process. We have to set the user’s region, then apply the license, then apply the options for that license.

Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName BrianJ@MOD873457.onmicrosoft.com -UsageLocation US
Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName BrianJ@MOD873457.onmicrosoft.com -AddLicenses “MOD873457:ENTERPRISEPREMIUM”
Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName BrianJ@MOD873457.onmicrosoft.com -AddLicenses “MOD873457:ENTERPRISEPREMIUM” -LicenseOptions $opts

And in pictures…

and more pictures: