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Licensing in Dynamics 365 is complex, licensing in D365FO is even more difficult. I’ve written numerous articles in the past on licensing but one question I get quite often is ‘What License Do SysAdmins Need in D365FO?’

Let’s take a look at what the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide says and if that matches what D365FO itself reports.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

Microsoft puts out a semi-regular licensing guide that covers all of the Dynamics 365 products, this can be found on this page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/product-licensing/dynamics365

The most recent version is the August 2024 version of this guide, if we start looking through it we see initially this topic appears to be fairly straight forward as it states:

But later on we get to this passage:

Which really would not make sense if SysAdmins really didn’t require a license, so the licensing guide somewhat contradicts itself on this topic.

Maybe D365FO will give us a clearer picture…

How Does D365FO Report This?

Within D365FO our first clue to an answer is during the role assignment process, Microsoft now lists what the license requirement is for each role on this form dialog. We can see in this case the license required is an ‘Operations’ license:

As a further test, we can assign this role to a user:

And then ensure that the ‘Named user license count reports processing’ batch job executes before looking at the User License Counts report (located at System Administration -> Inquiries -> License -> User License Counts), in this report we can also see that D365FO is reporting that assigning the ‘System Administrator’ role requires an ‘Operations’ level license:

Conclusion

In my opinion, the above demonstrates that a user assigned the SysAdmin role requires some sort of base license SKU to be applied (Finance, Supply Chain Management, or Commerce). This is because an ‘Operations’ license can no longer be assigned to a user, this license type equates to one of the license SKUs listed previously.

Could you make the argument that this user should not require any license based on the license guide from Microsoft? Potentially. But I am not sure it is worth that risk, let me know your thoughts on this and how you address this within your organization!