Managing or Obtaining the number of installations used and where by a user or all users for Office 365 Pro Plus

Hello,

From the research I've done thus far, I cannot find any way to determine (without being logged into the Office 365 portal as the user) which computers a user has installed their 5 available copies of the Office ProPlus applications. This is an E4 Enterprise implementation of the product and since users have the ability to allocate these 5 installs as they see fit, we don't see anyway to prevent users from removing their work PCs/laptops from their subscription (accidentally of course). Or if they are sharing their credentials with family members, how to keep them from using all their licenses and not having the ability to unlicense remote computers that we don't have access/contact information for.

I can't believe I'm the first person to raise the concern that as Administrators the only way we can take back control of the allocation would be to change the user's password and then log into the portal as them to remove the unauthorized (or accidentally allocated) copies of the software.

Is there another way to manage this for all users as a Global Enterprise Admin? or a powershell script to at least determine which computers all users have currently allocated installs to?

I've been sent to the PowerShell forum by the Office 365 Community blogs, who forwarded me to this forum.

Thanks for any input/guidance you might have. I'm hoping I just need to brush up on my internet forum search skills...

July 8th, 2014 7:33pm

I'll ask the question of our onsite Microsoft consulting guys, but it's my understanding that as enterprise admins, we have no controls over it. This is an outcome of putting the end-users in charge of their own destiny.
We can revoke a user's entitlement to Office365ProPlus in the portal and via scripts, but AFAIK only the user controls the allocation of their entitlement.

Revoking an assignment/allocation, when logged in as the user, doesn't require access to the assigned/allocated computer, but if the information about the assigned/allocated computers in the portal is vague or ambiguous, it's easy to revoke the "wrong" one.

There's not much here in this forum about the hosted/cloudy aspects, since this forum is mainly about the client-side bits (the client applications, setup and configuration of those) - so in here, I usually refer people off to the O365 community for the portal and hosted stuff.

(we have MS onsite at the moment for a big planning piece, around O365 and also Win8.1 and VDI. I'm not usually this lucky to have those guys on tap ;)

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July 8th, 2014 9:14pm

I agree with your thoughts/findings above. If there's not a secret/fancy way currently to get that visibility, it may just be something our help desk will have to learn to deal with if/when users accidentally uninstall their office on their machines.

I started off in the O365 community, and their moderator sent me to the Powershell Forum, who sent me here. I feel like I'm closest to a definitive answer I'm going to get without going full circle :).

Thanks for tapping your partners on my behalf, I'll watch for any response.

Pat

July 9th, 2014 9:00pm

Hmm. Seems to be difficult to get an answer to this one. I got a cryptic response "the user can do that themselves" (which I know), and, a promise to check into "if or when" Powershell script cmdlets might do this.

So it's sounding a lot like "portal admins can't do this in the portal"..

It reminds me a lot of the issues surrounding Microsoft Accounts (live.com etc) which are needed for Windows Store apps and there are no corporate dirsync or federation options for that either..

[ i.e., the end-user does it all and sysadmins can't help them nor fix it when they muck it up...]

</rant>

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July 10th, 2014 9:32pm

Hi,

I wonder if there are any news on the subject.

Thanks

March 14th, 2015 8:33am

Hi,

I wonder if there are any news on the subject.

Thanks


I've heard nothing further.
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March 14th, 2015 8:56pm

This looks interesting, from the MS O365 Roadmap "InDevelopment" section:

Office 365 ProPlus user activation management

Office 365 ProPlus user activation management allows administrators to view and manage Office 365 ProPlus activations on PCs or Macs directly from the Office 365 Admin Center 

March 17th, 2015 12:47pm

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