Adding/Removing User Office365 Licences using PowerShell and the Azure AD Graph RestAPI

In a recent blog post here I posted about the Azure AD v2.0 Preview Powershell cmdlets that are currently in preview. These update the functionality the current MSOL cmdlets provide whilst also supporting features they don’t (such as managing users with MFA).

The Azure AD v2.0 cmdlets interface with the Azure AD Graph API and this week I tried using the Set-AzureADUserLicense cmdlet to add/remove licenses from users in a test tenant. With no sample documentation for syntax I didn’t kick any goals so I figured I’d just go straight to using the Azure AD Graph API to get the job done direct from Powershell instead.

In this post I’m going to show you how to add/remove Office365 licenses from users using PowerShell and the Azure AD Graph API.

As per my other post linked above if you’ve installed the Azure AD Preview Powershell module you’ll have the Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.dll which we can leverage via Powershell to then connect to the Azure AD Graph API. Chances are you’ll have Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.dll though if you also have the AzureRM Modules installed or TFS. Just search your Program Files sub-directories.

# the default path to where the Azure AD Preview PS Module puts the Libs
'C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\AzureADPreview\1.1.143.0\Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.dll'
# TFS Path
'C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Team Foundation Server\14.0\Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.dll'
# Azure RM Cmdlets
'C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\AzureRM.ApiManagement\1.1.2\Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.dll'

Below you’ll find what you need to script your connection to Azure AD via the GraphAPI using the dll discussed above. Change $tenantID $username and $password to reflect you tenant and credentials.

Now that we’ve authenticated let’s enumerate our licenses. Bascially we make a RestAPI call to “https://graph.windows.net/{0}/subscribedSkus?api-version=1.6” as below. The particular license I want to add in my tenant is ExchangeStandard_Student. A key difference from the MSOL cmdlets though is adding or removing a license via the Graph API we reference the License skuId rather than skuPartNumber. The last line gets the skuId for my license.

Now to find the users that need to have the license assigned. Below in line 4 I search for users that are account enabled using this URI “https://graph.windows.net/{0}/users?$filter=accountEnabled eq true &api-version=1.6″  You can modify the filter for your criteria.

I then iterate through the users and find the users that aren’t assigned the license identified earlier above. I also exclude the AADConnect account for this tenant.

The GraphAPI expects the body with the info of licenses to be added or removed in a hashtable. So create the hashtable and convert it to JSON which is the format for Azure AD Graph API requires. Then for each of the unlicensed users we call the Azure AD GraphAPI URI “https://graph.windows.net/myorganization/users/$usertolicense`/assignLicense?api-version=1.6” and assign the license . In my environment it processed users at just over 1 user/sec.

A similar approach to remove licenses from users. A subtle difference is you only need to specify the skuId for removal as shown below. Note: you can add and remove licenses in the same call (if say you’re switching users over from one license plan to another).

All together for quick copy and paste. Update it for your tenant and creds. And remark out the Add or Remove depending on what you’re looking to do. If you’re looking to add/remove multiple licenses just add them to the hashtable/array.

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