How to mix Business Central Essential and Premium licenses in the same tenant
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
Reading time: 2 minutes
Updated: September 29, 2022
Intro
In earlier versions of the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide it was clearly stated that customers may not mix Essentials and Premium users but must license at least one of Essentials or Premium users. Customers must license either Essentials or Premium users, not both.
At least in the latest version of the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide (July 2022) this section has gone, so that would assume that you can now mix and match both Essential and Premium licenses.
- Question: ‘Are you able to mix and match Essential and Premium?’
- Answer: ‘Yes you can mix and match within same AAD tenant, but not in the same BC environment.’
This opens opportunities for customers who have multiple entities, where only in a minority of them Premium functionality is required. You can simply deploy environments with only Essential users and a specific environment with only Premium users.
How to mix and match
If you deploy multiple Business Central environments, you are recommended to control access on each environment using security groups for each environment. In that way you can create security groups for each environment to include only Essential or only Premium licensed users.
Syncing users on Business Central SaaS environment as per business needs, will bring only Essential or only Premium users using viral sign-up procedure. Users will be registered to a specific Business Central environment using the direct link to an environment.
- Example: https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/TENANT_ID/Env_name
Once synced you only need to setup user permissions according to the internal security policy.
- IMPORTANT: Do not run “Sync users from Microsoft 365” to bring more Business Central users (Essential/Premium/Team Member/Device/Ext Accountant) from M365, as this action will mix Business Central Essential and Premium users and that's not allowed on the same environment.
If you still need to sync more users (only Premium/Essential) on same environment with security groups activated, please use viral sign-up procedure to keep under synchronization process.
Using the functionality as described above gives you the opportunity to create the following combinations:
Environment 1: Premium + Team Member + External Accountant + Device
Environment 2: Essential + Team Member + External Accountant + Device
Update
Although the Business Central License guide is already allowing it, the MCA (Microsoft Customer Agreement) is still mentioning that it’s not allowed. We are currently waiting for Microsoft to update that one as well.
