How to Select the Correct Child Licenses in Okta for a Specific Parent License from Office 365
Jul 8, 2025
Okta Classic Engine
Okta Identity Engine
Lifecycle Management
Overview
In Office 365, a parent license and its child licenses (sub-licenses) can be seen, but in Okta, only the child licenses can be seen. Once provisioning is enabled and one of the provisioning types is selected, Okta will take control of the licenses and roles in Office 365. If child licenses are not set correctly in Okta for each user, they will be updated correctly on the Office side.
Applies To
- User Lifecycle Management
- Office 365
- Licenses
- Enabling and selecting a provisioning type
Solution
There are two ways to assign licenses from Okta:
- Individual: Assign a license for each user.
- Grouped: Create groups for each license, and assign all users in that group to get the same license on the Office side.
On the Office side, there are parent licenses (E3 License, E5 Premium, and so on), and each parent license has sub-licenses, called child licenses.
In Okta, it is not possible to see the parent licenses. Instead, it is possible to see all child licenses. To know exactly which child licenses we need to select on the Okta side, so that on the office side, the correct parent license to be assigned to each user, there is the following workaround:
- Create in OKta groups for each License available in Office.
- Select a user that is not assigned to the Office app in Okta (if it is, then we unassign the user from the app).
- Add one of the licenses in Office (E3 License).
- Import the user into Okta.
- Go to the Assignments tab of the Office app in Okta, click on the pencil icon for that user, and copy the child licenses selected under the
Licenseattribute to the corresponding group created in Okta, for the parent license that was assigned to this user on the Office side(E3 License). - Assign all users who will need to have the E3 Licenses assigned to them on the office side.
- Unassign the test user from the Office app in Okta.
- Repeat steps 2 to 7 for each license available in Office.
