Partners: Introducing a new way to manage and enforce licenses for your products

One of the top pieces of feedback we hear from our Dynamics and Power Platform partners is a request to make it easier to manage and enforce their software licenses on our platform. Today roughly half of our partners build and maintain their own custom-built license management systems while the other half do not have any solution in place.

Developing and maintaining a license management system takes time. So we are pleased to announce  a new capability called third-party app license management that enables our partners to manage and enforce licenses for their products using the same systems and technologies Microsoft uses for its own licensed products.

 

License assignment through the Microsoft 365 admin center

Admins can assign licenses of partner products using the Microsoft 365 admin center, a familiar portal which admins use today to manage Office and Dynamics licenses:

 

License enforcement built into the platform

The Power Platform will enforce partner product licenses at runtime to ensure that only licensed users can access a partner’s solutions. If a user has not been assigned a license for a solution then that solution will not appear in the user’s Dynamics Home Hub. Furthermore if that user is sent a direct link to the solution then they will be presented with a message indicating that a license is required:

 

Analytics and insights for partners

In Partner Center, partners can view aggregated reports of the types and quantities of licenses their customers own and whether those licenses have been assigned – a useful indicator to help understand whether customers are getting value from their license purchases:

 

 

Learn more and try it out

This new capability is available now. A few things to note: third-party app license management supports the Dynamics CE/Power Platform offer type in Partner Center and supports license enforcement of model-driven apps. Looking ahead we intend to build support for other Partner Center offer types and for the ability to secure Dataverse tables (entities) and SDK messages.

To get started:

• Watch this 30min webinar which provides an end to end overview
• Review the step-by-step walkthrough guide
• Post any questions you have to the Pro Dev and ISV Forum
• Get in touch with us at ISVLicenseManagement at microsoft.com to share your thoughts on this new capability

We look forward to your feedback!

Arif Gani – Senior PM, Commerce

Shawn Nandi  – Principal PM, Power Platform