Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Best practice to define license needs?

Dear,

As a MS Partner, what would be the best way to "simulate" a client's environment, to decide (and test) what kind of license they would need, on top of their existing MS licenses, to gain access to specific functionalities.

For example, if a customer already has some (administrative) users with Dynamics 365 Field Service, would it suffice to give other users (field service technicians) a "Dynamics Team Member license" in order to use the "Dynamics Field Service Mobile App" to fulfill Work Orders?

We would like to be able to simulate/impersonate an end-user (in this case a technician, with only the "Team member license") to see if the app works as expected.

Do we need to create some sort of "sub/test tenant" within in our Azure tenant in which we create simulated users, then buy and assign licenses to these users, and then configure a whole new Dynamics environment... ? This is quite cumbersome in time (setting up a whole new tenant and Dynamics environment can take quite some hours) and expenses (we need to buy the same existing licenses the customer already has, and also additional needed licenses)...

I know of the existence of CDX environments, and trial licenses, but since these are almost all based on "full blown" licenses, there is no way to test "real use cases" (like the Team Member licenses)...

The MS Dynamics licensing guide is also quite freely interpretable and does not answer really specific practical use cases...

Are there any other tools to check whether a (combination of) license(s) is needed to gain access to certain functionalities,

Best regards,

Koen

Yeah, MSFT licensing is a headache, to be sure. But I think you may be overcomplicating things a bit here. Licenses available at the tenant level have no bearing on capabilities in any one environment. That is, the fact that somewhere in my Org there are D365 Sales licenses does not mean anything in a Dataverse database that does not have any such licensed users.

So, in order for you to replicate customer licensing conditions, there is no need for you to have a separate tenant. You can reproduce this in a new env in your existing tenant. Granted, you still need to buy those licenses (annoying) and create/configure the environment (also annoying) but at least you don't need to create an entirely new tenant.

Quick Links

Leaderboard > Power Apps - Power Apps Pro Dev & ISV