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We're excited to announce the availability of scheduled billing plan changes upon renewal for Microsoft NCE subscriptions. Following the Storefront’s announcement on Release 3.28.179, this BSS feature allows you to schedule a change of the billing plan (when applicable) that will take place during the renewal date of the NCE subscription. Possible billing plans include the Monthly, Annual, and One-time Payment.

💎 Value: This feature in the BSS portal gives you greater control and flexibility over your Microsoft subscriptions by allowing you to automate billing plan changes at the renewal date to reduce administrative overhead and improve forecasting. This proactive approach simplifies subscription management.

🚀 Activation: If after the release 3.28.179, you have already run the 'Get Services Definition' (GSD) process for all instances of Microsoft Cloud Services Service Manager, there's no need to re-run it since the Billing Plans functionality is available during scheduling changes for the Storefront and the BSS portals. Otherwise, after this release 3.28.181, you have to run the 'Get Services Definition' (GSD) process for all Microsoft Cloud Services Service Manager instances, to make the Billing Plans functionality available during scheduling changes for both the Storefront and BSS portals.

Key prerequisites for the feature to function include:

• Auto-renewal option to be enabled,

• Billing plans to be active on both the instance and the account,

• Billing plans to be supported for the product SKU by Microsoft.

⚙️ How it works: From the Subscription view page in BSS, click the Manage Renewal button. In the respective pop-up window that appears, select the desired billing frequency (e.g., monthly, annual, or one-time payment) for the next term, provided the product supports it and your account and instance meet the necessary prerequisites mentioned above (like auto-renewal and billing plans being enabled).^{These changes are then saved by clicking on the Submit button and automatically applied when the subscription renews.}

⌛ Coming soon: Upcoming releases will add the ability to change the Billing Term in both the Storefront and BSS portals.

Tenant Resellers Can Now Checkout Products in the Root’s Storefront for Affiliate Accounts

We are thrilled to announce an enhancement in the Root’s Storefront portal for Tenant resellers. Specifically, Tenant resellers with back-ordering enabled, can now checkout for both personal use (as it was previously available) and affiliate accounts.

💎 Value: This update significantly benefits tenant resellers while simplifying and streamlining the checkout process, providing more options as well as greater flexibility and convenience.

⚙️ How it works: Tenant resellers, with the back-ordering mechanism activated, can now select the option “It is for personal usage” inside the Basket Items step of the checkout process of the Root’s Storefront portal and then select an affiliate account or create a new one, before completing the checkout.

We are excited to announce the release of a new filtering rule that governs the listing and visibility of Storefront Unlisted Products for White Label resellers of the Standard Edition. This rule governing which products are displayed in the Unlisted Products tab inside the Standard Edition resellers' Storefront tabs ensures a more streamlined and efficient experience for all because the resellers' end customers can now manage existing subscriptions for products that no longer appear on the Storefront. So, with this new filter/rule, they will be able to manage them. Specifically, the new rule states that inside the Unlisted Products tab, the visible products must also contain products that have an existing active, inactive, or suspended subscription for at least one end customer.

💎 Value: With this new rule for Unlisted Products, resellers can easily differentiate between Listed and Unlisted Products, while their end customers can manage existing subscriptions for products that no longer appear on the Standard Edition reseller's Storefront portal.

⚙️ How it works: The Unlisted Products tab will now include not only inactive products, not included in the price list, with the "Show in Storefront" option deactivated, but also products with an existing active, inactive, or suspended subscription for at least one end customer, so that end customers can manage their subscriptions.

In this release, we have decided to temporarily stop accepting imports of NCE subscriptions from the Microsoft Partner Center (MPC) through the Import Customers Tool if they have Scheduled Changes. This action has been taken to safeguard you as well asyour existing MPC subscriptions that have Scheduled Changes, because our Import Customers Tool cannot yet recognize Schedule Changes in order to import or store them and then have the system perform them upon the subscription’s renewal. Therefore, as of this release, the Tool will not allow the import of such subscriptions onto our platform. Users are informed that the subscription import has failed because the schedule change for such a subscription cannot be imported from the Microsoft Partner Center to our platform and must be removed before retrying to import the subscription again.

🔹 We are actively addressing this issue, and you can be assured that future releases will fully support cases involving NCE subscriptions with Scheduled Changes. Consequently, the Tool will be capable of importing these subscriptions while ensuring alignment with Microsoft.

The following issues were addressed, with fixes applied where necessary:

1. Installment Renewal Issue - Issue Resolved: We have resolved an issue where the Billing Service cycle prevented the renewal of installment plans for various accounts and organizations. This resulted in missed renewals for numerous subscriptions. The issue arose when at least one manage renewal action was present, which blocked all installment renewals. The fix ensures that only subscriptions with a manage renewal action in the current organization are excluded, allowing other renewals to proceed as expected.

2. Action Button Error in Storefront - Issue Resolved: We have resolved an issue where the action button in the Storefront would return an error when attempting to revoke a pending Scheduled Change in a subscription. The error has been resolved, and the presence of the action button in this context has been corrected.

3. Issue with an Add-on Name Display in the Service Manager: We have resolved a very rare issue where the add-on name was not visible on the subscription details page. The problem occurred when creating a subscription with an add-on, resulting in the add-on name being empty in the request payload of the Service Manager. This fix ensures that the add-on name is now properly included and displayed on the subscription details page.