Bulk assign Power BI licenses using Azure AD

Another interesting question that I got earlier this week is how to assign bulk Power BI licenses to users based on their group membership. Fortunately this turns out to be rather straight forward, as with many cases the fact that Power BI is build on top of the Azure Stack helps us out yet again. Today we will be using Azure AD Premium and the Enterprise Mobility Suite to achieve our goal.

For this purpose I went to my test tenant and activated Azure AD Premium and Enterprise Mobility Suite preview. Next I created a security group called “testgroup”:

Then I created a user in Office 365 that is member of my “testgroup” and doesn’t have a Power BI pro license (yet).

Now let’s assign a Power BI Pro license to all users in the testgroup. To do this I go back to Azure AD and click on licenses:

And then when I select “All products” I see the whole list of products in my domain, including both Power BI licenses:

Now to assign a license I select the group “Power BI Pro” and click on “Licensed Groups”:

Now I can use Assign button to add the “testgroup”, observe that the office group doesn’t show up here, I assume it doesn’t work for pure Office groups:

Then I assign the Power BI Pro license:

and when I am done I select “Assign”:

Now I can see the group “testgroup” has Power BI Pro licenses assigned:

And when I go back to the Office 365 portal I can see the user now has a Power BI Pro license:

So that is simple elegant way to assign product licenses to your organization.