Why to use billing groups?

A billing group is nothing other than a simple Active Directory group, but we use this to meter the SPLA usage of user based licenses like Exchange, Office or Remote Desktop Services SAL.

There are several reasons why this is a good approach but the main ones are:

When you use new groups dedicated for reporting usage you can merge the organizational with the technical administration without affecting the environment.

In most environments there are already groups in place to control access to resources, e. g. RDP access, Office on RDP server, etc. When you then create a new billing group “Billing-Office” and then nest your existing ACL groups in, let’s assume they are named “RDP-OfficeSTD” and “RDP-Logon”, then the admin doesn’t be aware of licensing, he just gives access as he always did.

The inventory process is going through the nested group memberships and is then able to book a SKU for RDP SAL and for Office Standard.

Another important thing why to use groups is, that in SPLA you have to report the possiblity of the usage, not the real usage. So if a account is not using a product, or a interactive login can’t be detected then the group membership still allows a correct booking of the license. In short: this is the safest way to detect all usages, even with a little overhead, but in general it is a good practice to have groups to control access to resources/software products.

The last thing to say is that in SPLA there are several SKUs which use the same technical product, e. g. we have

• Exchange Basic
• Exchange Standard
• Exchange Enterprise
• Exchange Standard Plus
• Exchange Enterprise Plus

The “Plus” products have an Outlook included, but this is not detectable in a technical way. Using billing groups is closing the gap between organization and technical environment. There are several other products who have the same problem like System Center Standard/Enterprise.