Categories

I.  Overview

A License Pool is an organizationally-defined segmentation of data that is designed specifically to enable the fine-grained administration of an organization's Office 365 subscriptions and services.  The ability to create and maintain License Pools is part of the following CoreView subscription plans.  Subscription plans tagged as "Deprecated" are no longer being sold as of January 2019.

  • CoreSuite
  • CoreAdmin
  • Enterprise (Deprecated)
  • Professional (Deprecated)
  • Full Suite (Deprecated)
  • Delegated Administration (Deprecated)
  • License Management (Deprecated)

You can access the License Pool management feature by clicking on the Management Menu and then on Manage License Pools.  When you first enter Manage License Pools, the page will be empty.  To initialize your License Pools, you will need to click on the Manage drop down menu on the right side of the Manage License Pools page and then select Configure.


The Configure License Pool User Interface


The Configure License Pool user interface is quite simple and consist of three key areas.

  1. The Configure License Pool web page.  This represents the entirety of your working area when configuring License Pools.
  2. License Pool Filter Criteria Mode.  This is where you select the Filter Criteria you feel is best suited to define your License Pools.  Please note that the set of available Filter Criteria  is fixed to a subset of account attributes and those most likely to be used to define a License Pools.  Please see Section II, below for additional information.
  3. Configuration Options tabs.  You access these tabs to add the licenses you want to manage as well as where you can define any overhead costs for License Management, should this be needed for the purposes of chargeback.


II. License Pool Filter Criteria Modes

A License Pool is defined by one of two Filter Criteria .  The type of Filter Criteria  can be selected one of the two Modes. below.  The Mode selection is identified by B above.


Enforce -  This Filter Criteria  will define all License Pools.  You also have the ability to define a second level Filter Criteria to add an additional layer of segmentation. 

Assign - Allows you to rely on CoreView Portal Attributes versus an attribute that is associated with an account.  These attributes are stored by CoreView within your CoreView Tenant and these are typically used by customers when, for any reason, an organization doesn't feel that they can rely on an Azure AD attribute under Enforce.


The quality of the data associated with any account attribute selected as a Filter Criteria under Enforce is critically important.  License Pools will be created based on individuals who are assigned licenses and the value found in the Filter Criteria  attribute. Therefore, any data quality issues will be quickly apparent once CoreView has resolved all the Pool names.  


At the moment, License Pool names are case sensitive.  While CoreView does offer a maintenance method to work around data quality issues, we strongly recommend that any data quality issues be addressed at their source, to avoid any ongoing issues.


III. Configuring License Pools

To configure a License Pool, you simply select the appropriate Filter Criteria, then click on the SKUs tab and add to the Pool collection all SKUs that you wish to manage.  Please not that you need to select all SKUs that are relevant across all of the Pools.  Once you do that , click on the blue check button and the Pool creation will begin. The time it takes to build the Pools depends on your user population.


IV.  Microsoft SKU Friendly Names

CoreView provides a translation within the application between the official Office 365 Product Name (SKU), which is in format ENTERPRISEPACK to its corresponding Friendly Name, such as Office 365 E3.  CoreView maintains this translation to benefit all CoreView customers.  If you happen to notice a missing Friendly Name or where you might see a Friendly Name isn't consistent with what you see in Office 365, please open a Support Case and we will get that quickly corrected.


V. More on Office 365 Licenses

For additional information on Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions and licensing, please click on the links below.

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Published: 03/10/2019

Updated: 08/27/20