M365 Changelog: Introducing Support for Concurrent Exchange Online License Assignments

MC541151 – Microsoft has recently enabled a new feature in Office 365, which allows tenant admins to assign more than one Exchange Online license per AAD user. This provides license stacking support and automatic license feature upgrades and downgrades based on the most superior Exchange Online license pack assigned to a user.

SharePoint Online and Teams, for example, have been supporting concurrent license assignments for their own services for some time now. This new feature hence helps bring the same level of support to Exchange Online.

When this will happen:

This has already been rolled out in January 2023.

How this will affect your organization:

As a tenant admin, you would still need to run reporting on license assignments and determine which users might have more than one Exchange Online license assigned. You might then elect to remove the least superior licenses from that user and send them back to the pool of unused licenses, so other users can benefit from them. This is important to understand: if two (or more) licenses are assigned, all of them are “in use” (and might be billed).

What you need to do to prepare:

This message is for your awareness and no action is needed.

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