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We’re excited to announce a powerful addition to our platform’s supported Microsoft catalog offerings, called Specialized Offers. Specialized offers are a new commerce capability. Microsoft enables customized offers for a specific (pre-qualified) set of partners to purchase. These specialized offers are created to address a particular partner's unique business, which needs special offers modeled for their circumstances.

Let’s dive into the details:

1. What Are Specialized Offers?

   • Specialized offers are customized for select partners, and modeled to fit their specific business needs and circumstances.

   • These offers result from conversations between Microsoft’s business teams and partner organizations, resulting in unique agreements and terms.

2. Discovering and Purchasing

   • After this release (3.28.146) Specialized Offers will be available for download via the Get Services Definition process of the Microsoft Service Managers of our platform to certain pre-qualified partners, and are identified inside your updated Microsoft catalog with the prefix “SPECIALOFFERS”.

   • You can also access the catalog in the Microsoft Partner Center to find these Specialized Offers alongside other offer types, while you can also retrieve specialized offers via catalog APIs (specifically getSKU).

     • Please note that specialized offers are highly targeted and may not be available for all partners.

3. Subscription Management

   • You can manage specialized offer subscriptions similarly to the regular New Commerce Experience (NCE) offers.

   • Upgrades are currently possible only from specialized offers to standard NCE offers.

   • Midterm transitions from a standard offer to a specialized offer of the same base offer are not permitted.

4. Pricing and Billing

   • Specialized Offers are not listed in the new commerce price lists, meaning that the prices (after being agreed with Microsoft) must be manually assigned to the respective SKUs, before making them available for purchase.

   • Be aware that some Specialized Offers may have different SKUs for each term and billing plan combination.

In this release, we are introducing the ability for BSS users to create custom merge fields for Contacts, that are also associated with the Order entity. These alphanumeric custom fields allow you to capture, for example, the email addresses of users (Contacts) who place orders via the Storefront portal. By linking these fields to Order Confirmation Notification Emails, you’ll ensure accurate communication with your customers. These Contact custom fields can also be utilized inside the Reports module as well as inside the Advanced Search module of the BSS portal.

With this release, we are introducing two new endpoints for managing subscriptions via the Standard Reseller API.

• POST api/subscriptions/{subsriptionId}/quantity (decrease) -Creates a quantity decrease request, that has an immediate effect, based on the given subscription ID.

• GET /api/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/quantityrequest/{requestId} - Retrieves the state of the quantity change (decrease) request, based on the given request ID.

As you already know, from the 3.28.134 release, paid subscriptions can be created only by placing an order and only trial subscriptions will be created using the current method of creating subscriptions. The API will also be updated to match this functionality, to align with the interface. Please note that on June 30th, the following API V2.2 endpoints will be deprecated:

• POST /api/Subscriptions

• POST /api/Subscriptions/invoiced

How to Create a Paid Subscription by Executing an Order

To create a paid subscription without the use of these endpoints, use the following API V3 endpoints:

• POST /api/orders - To create an order

• POST /api/orders/{orderId}/items - To add items to the order

• POST /api/orders/{orderId}/execute - To execute the order

• GET /api/orders/{orderId}/execute/status - To retrieve the status of the order

A paid subscription based on the order will be created when the status of the order is Executed.

API V3.0 - New Endpoint Addition for the Creation of a Trial Subscription

A new endpoint has been added to API V3.0 for the purpose of creating trial subscriptions:

[POST] /api/Subscriptions/Trials

The following issue was addressed, with fixes applied where necessary:

1. Missing Auto-Renew History if Change was Performed from the Storefront - Issue Resolved: We have identified an issue related to the changes of auto-renewal settings from Storefront not being accurately reflected in the BSS history log of the respective subscriptions. When a Storefront user toggled the auto-renew option either ON or OFF, the change was not consistently reflected in the BSS history log of the subscription. To address this, we have enhanced the auto-renewal update process, and now, every auto-renewal change is logged, allowing you to track who made the modification and when it occurred. This ensures transparency and accountability for subscription management.
   

2. Error in Reporting of Subscriptions with Future Requests - Issue Resolved: An issue was identified that related to a reporting error when subscriptions with future requests were in that report. After a thorough investigation, it was found that a database issue was responsible for the error of the reporting mechanism. We have fully resolved the issue by correcting our database issue and now, every such report functions as intended.