I wanted to give a periodic update about user licensing in D365FO for July 2020. With the GA release of 10.0.12/PU36 there has been some changes regarding user licensing to address some of the issues I went over in my previous user licensing post in May.
Here are some of the changes:
License types available in 10.0.12/PU36
Base licenses:
- Finance
- Supply Chain Management (SCM)
- Commerce (Retail)
Add-on licenses:
- Finance
- Supply Chain Management (SCM)
- Commerce (Retail)
- Talent
- Asset Management (EAM)
License analysis now done with a combination of entry point and privilege level licensing
The analysis of user licenses follows the following process:
- Step 1 – Determine if the user is assigned a role that contains a privilege that is defined by Microsoft to require one of the new license SKUs
- If so, then privilege based licensing is applied
- To help with this, I created an Excel document to show the association between privilege and license SKU
- Step 2 – Determine if the user is assigned an object that requires an Operations license based on the entry point licensing methodology
- If so, the user must be assigned at least 1 base license
- Step 3 – If neither of the the first two steps are met, then the entry point based licensing takes over to determine if the user requires an Activity or Team Member license
This starts to address the gaps I mentioned in my previous post of:
- Custom privileges
- If a custom privilege is created that would require an Operations level license then it would fall under Step 2 listed above
- Otherwise if the custom privilege would not require an Operations level license then it would fall under Step 3 above
- Modifications to out of box privileges (granting additional access or removing access)
- If it is a privilege that is defined by Microsoft to require one of the new license SKUs, then the privilege license SKU logic still applies (this is still a gap in the currently logic)
- If a privilege is modified that would require an Operations level license, then it would fall under Step 2 above
- Otherwise the modified privilege then the entry point based licensing takes over to determine if Activity or Team Member license would be required
This is a great first step in making the licensing discussion easier to understand, but in my opinion this is just a ‘middle ground’. The final solution is still to have these new license SKUs tied to the menu items themselves (like the old licensing was), whether that’s as a property on the object itself or done in a database table. Until that happens, hopefully this guide helps in explaining the current licensing methodology.