Microsoft Entra P1 and Microsoft 365 A1 Licencing

[speckledegg]

Afternoon All,

 

We're starting to look at budgets here and would like to start setting up MFA for our staff users but not our students due to us being a 2 form entry primary school and the logistics behind getting the younger children using MFA to authenticate with. I'm hoping we can potentially set up conditional access for staff so that they don't require MFA in school and potentially for students too if it does become enforced.

 

I just wanted to check, are other primary schools of a similar size using their free Microsoft 365 A1 licences for faculty and students in conjunction with Entra P1 licencing? and if so, is this sufficient for you in being able to determine/manage who has MFA enabled on their accounts or not?

 

From looking at other posts on Edugeek, the Entra P2 licencing is more desirable as it allows you to set more policies surrounding the enforcement of MFA for users.

 

I've looked at comparisons between the licencing, but still find it quite unclear, so I just wanted some yes/no clarity on it basically.

 

Thanks in advance :-)

[mavhc]

You can manually enable MFA for certain people for free, but no conditional access, just "don't ask again for x days", breaks auto logging into teams/onedrive/etc though, because they forget to reauth

[speckledegg]

Ah ok, that's good to know and thanks for clarifying more on the MFA side.

 

From what I can gather after doing more research is that certain licencing like A3 has the P1 licencing included in it...but depending on the type of licencing agreement you're already on with Microsoft, it can be more economical to just retain your free A1 licences if that's all you've ever had previously, and supplement them with a separate batch of P1 licences where appropriate to get the premium features of Entra AD that are required.

 

From speaking with our licencing reseller, it's looking like buying into separate licences for P1 is the better option for us, but if we have the budget for it, I'm thinking P2 just so we have all the functionality available. I just don't want to risk being stuck with it for a year if it doesn't do everything that's required policies wise.

 

I may see if I can check another Microsoft tenant I manage to see if they have any Entra licencing so I can have a play as the free trial requires a credit card which is a pain and I think our Finance Officer will be hesitant to use it for this purpose just in case it backfires.

Edited March 2, 2024 by anselmtech

[jmak]

I joined https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program which gets you a free tenancy.

 

It says for developers and says you need to carry out qualifying work to maintain the free subscription. I do only use it for testing and never for production uses, but I don't do anything other than basic testing and it's auto renewed for them last two years.

[XiJ]

I joined https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program which gets you a free tenancy.

 

It says for developers and says you need to carry out qualifying work to maintain the free subscription. I do only use it for testing and never for production uses, but I don't do anything other than basic testing and it's auto renewed for them last two years.

 

That’s interesting. I’ve never found out what the ‘qualifying work’ is. I use it to develop power shell scripts using the graph API mainly - just make sure I make a few calls each month !