Office 365 Groups Could Trigger AAD Licensing Requirements

• Office 365 Groups management features have become more powerful as the offering has matured.
• The features can cause unintentional license violations that force unplanned purchases.

Office 365 Groups is an online service that offers discussions and data sharing for Office 365 users, and it is used as a platform on which several Office 365 programs build collaboration features. While it is included as part of most Office 365 Enterprise suites, additional Azure Active Directory (AAD) Premium P1 licensing is required for some features that users and administrators might assume are free.

Groups are Organized Around Intended Uses

Office 365 Groups allow users or administrators to create groups, which are collections of AAD users that are granted access to shared resources such as a shared Exchange inbox, a OneNote notebook, a SharePoint team site, or a SharePoint document library. Groups can be created in many Office 365 services, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, and Yammer. Each service creates groups with slightly different shared resources (for example, groups created in Outlook automatically get a shared inbox, but Yammer groups do not).