Overview

During the Teams Service setup process you will be required to provide an unassigned O365 user licence. You may be wondering why this is required, what the cost implications of this are or whether there is a way of avoiding this requirement.


By providing the additional licence the portal can perform all the set-up tasks on your behalf and remove the need for any specialist skills or training.


The unassigned licences are only required once, for the few minutes during the initial set-up process. When this is completed you can release the licences.


> The licence needs to a be one that includes Teams, so a phone system or Business Voice addon is not sufficient.


Cost of additional licences:

There are several ways to mitigate or completely eliminate the cost of providing the temporary licence during set-up:

  • Apply a free-trial offer from Microsoft (recommended) 

Within the MS portal you can take up the following free-trial subscriptions without charge for 30 days:

  • E5 – 25 users
  • Business Premium – 25 users
  • Common Area Phone – 25 users (recommended)

The choice of the free trial you take depends on the SKUs you already have, any of the above SKUs will suffice.

There is an article Here on finding Microsoft Free Licences.

  • Temporary removing a licence from an existing user. (Making the licence unassigned)

Microsoft support the temporary removal of a licence for up to 30 days without affecting the configuration of the user. Our requirement is for around 15 minutes. You can find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/manage/remove-licenses-from-users?view=o365-worldwide

 

  • Purchase an additional licence for a short period.

Office 365 licence billing is prorated to the day. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/common-billing-scenarios-monthly

The cost of adding and removing a business essentials licence for one day is around USD $0.16; in practice our understanding is that MS won’t bill you for such a short period.

 

Why is the Additional Licence required?

This requirement is for convenience of the set-up process and mitigates the need for you to perform domain-based set-up tasks. You can research the underlying mechanisms and why this is required for your reference at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/direct-routing-sbc-multiple-tenants

 

You can view the set up guide here.

Our automation removes the need for your intervention by using a spare licence to perform these tasks by proxy. If you prefer not to facilitate a space licence then these steps will be required as detailed in our set-up process.


What if it's impossible to provide additional Licences?

If you can't provide the additional licences, the portal will pause during the set-up process and provide instructions to manually perform some tasks. Once performed the set-up automation will resume.

Note

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