SLA for a Licence/Feature Change to to become Active in Office 365, 24 hours

Just something to consider in your project planning / operational service planning with Office 365 / Skype for Business Online / Microsoft Teams.

When you apply a licence or a policy to a user, it can take a variable amount of time to become active. This seems to range from a few minutes to as much as 10-11 hours in one recent case on a customer we were working on.

I can’t find a publically documented “Service Level Agreement” (if I’ve missed it please do point me to it),  but upon raising tickets with Microsoft support we have been told to re-raise after 24 hours as the delay could just be the time it takes for the policy to apply.

Update 01/03/2018: Dave Wilson in the Modality Team found this Official Microsoft reference:

“Latency after assigning licenses: Because of the latency between Office 365 and Skype for Business Online, it can possibly take up to 24 hours for a user to be assigned a Calling Plan after you assign a license. If after 24 hours the user isn’t assigned a Calling Plan, please Contact support for business products – Admin Help.”

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SkypeForBusiness/skype-for-business-and-microsoft-teams-add-on-licensing/assign-skype-for-business-and-microsoft-teams-licenses?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Another reference:

Whereas the service typically takes less than 30 minutes to provision a user, it can sometimes take up to 24 hours to fully provision a user for all services in Office 365. Therefore, wait 24 hours before you escalate the issue.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3063407/new-office-365-users-are-not-provisioned-for-skype-for-business-online

Remember to consider this if you are doing time-sensitive actions such as a PSTN cutover, or just setting up new users.

Thanks to various members of the Modality team for confirming across multiple projects.