Automatic licensing

Managing your Google Workspace subscription is a core feature for every company and (as it brings the money) is core for every cloud provider. So you would expect that Google manage this as no one else. Think again. To manage licensing, Google is offering 3 options. See Google Help if you are not familiar with them. Let's review each item:

- manual assignments

Manual assignments might be acceptable when you are a very small business. For everyone else, this is not a valid option.

- API assignments

Creating your own Rest API script to manage your licenses might be acceptable for very large organisations with a large IT department to manage an exceptional process. For everyone else, this should not be a valid option.

- GCDS

Are you already using GCDS? Within this (server based) application you also have the option to assign licenses. This might be a valid options as many organisation will already use GCDS. Downside of this, is that you will always need to login to the remote server to manage and view/edit your configuration. Not ideal for a Google admin who is used to do everything in the Chrome browser.

- Google Admin panel

So the most logic (and my personal view) the only correct place to manage licenses in Google Workspace is the Google Workspace admin console. At first sight the License settings make sense if you look at the configuration. You can pick the license, you can pick the OU, and automatically assign the license to the OU. All good you would think.

After some experience as a reseller, you will go mad about the strange limitations and license issue you will have in real life. Lets sum them up:

- Archive user licensing
To keep the data of users who have left the organisation, Google offers Archive user license. To buy those licenses, you go to your reseller or you buy them on the Billing > Subscription page. To manage the license you have to go to the User page and mark the user as Archived. Make sense? No, you want to move the user to a OU specific for archived users, so that you can manage those former employees all together in a OU instead of spread across the different OUs.

- Cloud identity free licensing & Android Management

Both are free licensing. However they enable features for users. The Google Workspace design limits the way how you can apply those licenses. Instead of doing the proven (good) way as you would manage regular Google Workspace licensing, the license is automatically assigned to new users. Why? It is just the Google way. 

 

Dear Google,

You might want to make some money by selling licenses. Please make license management simple and available for your customers. This will help to assign license to the right users and makes reporting and acquiring more licenses simpler.

Thank you!