Hard to Find Logic for Copilot License Check in Exchange Connectivity Tool

Unless you’re a keen reader of the Microsoft blogs posted to the Microsoft Technical community, you might have missed the August 25 article about a new diagnostic tool for a “Copilot License Details Check.” According to the text, it’s “a powerful tool designed to streamline and validate your license readiness by confirming whether Copilot for Microsoft 365 licenses are properly assigned to users.” In reality, it’s some Graph API requests cobbled together to report details of a Microsoft 365 Copilot license assignment to a user account that’s been bolted onto the side of the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer (ExRCA).

As I explain in another article, ExRCA started as a troubleshooting tool to help Exchange on-premises administrators debug connectivity problems with protocols like Autodiscover and ActiveSync (check out the YouTube video from that time). Later, Microsoft upgraded ExRCA to support Exchange Online and Teams. At this point, it’s fair to say that ExRCA is an invaluable tool for Microsoft 365 tenant administrators.

However, having a valuable support tool is no reason to bolt on a license checker. I’m sure Microsoft will point to the inclusion of the message header analyzer tool in ExRCA as evidence that ExRCA has become a toolbox, but that’s missing the point that the message header tool is at least associated with a messaging protocol (SMTP) whereas the Copilot license check is a barefaced attempt to help people use more Copilot features.

Running a Copilot License Check

Running a Copilot license check is very simple. Input the user principal name or primary SMTP address of a user account, sign in as an administrator with permissions to access user account details, and the code runs to verify that the account has a Microsoft 365 Copilot license with all its service plans intact (Figure 1).

A Simple Check

Stripping everything away, the license check is very simple and the results that it generates are equally simple (no expensive CPU cycles for AI analysis are burned here). Figure 2 shows that the user being checked is good to go. I’m sure that this is deemed to be a successful test.

But some issues exist. First, the test doesn’t distinguish between direct-assigned licenses and group-assigned licenses, which is valuable information for an administrator to know if they want to address a problem highlighted by the test. Second, the test only considers a “full” Microsoft 365 Copilot license to be valid. Trial licenses are not considered valid. Third, disabling some Copilot features is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Not everyone needs to create new agents through Copilot Studio, for example.

PowerShell Code for the Copilot License Check

To show what the ExRCA Copilot check does, I recreated the check using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. The code is simple and took about an hour to write (including testing):

• Sign into the Graph with Connect-MgGraph using an administrator account.
• Prompt for a user account and validate that the account exists.
• Check that the account has a valid Microsoft 365 Copilot license (including trial licenses). License and service plan information is available online.
• Run the Get-MgUserLicenseDetail cmdlet to retrieve service plan information for the Copilot SKU.
• Check each of the service plans defined in the license to report if it is enabled or disabled.

Figure 3 shows some sample output.

You can download the script from the Office 365 for IT Pros GitHub repository.

No Reason to Use ExRCA to Check License Details

I don’t know how many Microsoft 365 tenant administrators will seek out ExRCA to answer questions like “I wonder if the Copilot license assigned to John Doe is good to go?” It seems like an unnatural reaction to consider ExRCA in that light when it’s straightforward to build your own tools to measure user readiness for Copilot or analyze and report licenses assigned to user accounts (including disabled service plans).

The idea might be a good one, but I fear it’s implemented in the wrong place and is too limited to deliver much value.

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