In this article we'll explore how to assign a Microsoft Teams Phone license to a group using Admin Center. You might have an on-prem Active Directory where you happily got all of your users organised in groups, and when you want to add one of your AD group to a license subscription using Microsoft 365 Admin Center, you might find this error

As usual, this error is total non-sense from Microsoft and it doesn't give you a real explanation of what the problem is, the  "Please try again" will only lead to time wasting an frustration

The issue is that, in order to add a group to a Microsoft Teams Phone Standard, these groups must also be a member a Microsoft Office subscription

For example, see on this screenshot where I have 3 x different groups assigned to the Microsoft Teams Phone Standard:

As you can see, I have name each of the Teams group with the Office subscription to which they are related to. Microsoft will not allow you to add a new group into the Phone Standard group license unless the group that you are adding has been added prior to an office subscription

For our tenant, I have the 365 Business Basic associated to the Teams Phone Basic group, the E2 office license is associated to the Phone E2 and of course the Business Premium contains the Phone Premium group

Key note: the important thing to remember is to use only one group for the MS Teams phone licences, and have that group associated to your cheapest Office 365 subscription, if that makes sense!

London, March 2025

References

• https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/why-am-i-unable-to-assign-the-license-teams-phone/ba7aad63-04d6-4f77-b7e3-9c88ed3cc364 
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/users/licensing-admin-center