Versions Compared

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

Excerpt

The Microsoft Perpetual Licenses are managed by the same service manager we have implemented for the rest of Microsoft cloud services. So, you must run the Updating the Microsoft Cloud Services Catalogue process for activating the Perpetual Licenses in your BSS. This process will create in your BSS the Microsoft Perpetual License products that you can resell.

Rw ui textbox macro
typeinfo

(star) Perpetual License Updates of the 3.28.65* Release

Automatic Sell & Cost Prices of Perpetual License Products

We fully support all Perpetual Licenses qualifications and the pricing rules introduced by Microsoft:

  1. All Perpetual Licenses qualifications are fully supported: The Commercial, Education, Government Community Cloud, and Non-Profit qualifications are fully supported by our platform and a distinct set of products is created automatically for each qualification.

  2. Automatic Upload of Perpetual License Products Prices: The existing integration of Perpetual Licenses now supports the automatic retrieval and assignment of prices to Perpetual License products, without the need for manual

interventions and
  1. price

imports
  1. import.

Qualifications are fully and automatically supported: The Perpetual License qualifications are fully and automatically supported by our platform
  1. Prices are calculated automatically based on the end customer’s country and currency: CSP cost and Microsoft SRP prices are retrieved from the Microsoft pricing files during order placement.

  2. Conversion Tool for Unsupported Microsoft Currencies: For currencies that are not officially supported by Microsoft we offer a user-friendly currency conversion tool in which foreign exchange rates can be created and stored so as to support those currencies while reselling Perpetual License products.

*The above updates become available to our new and existing customers once the Get Services Definition process is performed on all your Microsoft instances of your BSS organization before using the Perpetual License products after the current release.
(warning) Informative Important Note for Existing customers of Perpetual Licenses

Rw ui textbox macro
typeinfo

(warning) Important Note for Customers using Perpetual Licenses before the 3.28.65 Release

What Happens to the (Older) Manually Imported Perpetual Licenses into BSS, after the release note 3.28.65 and onwards?

Since the automatic assignment of Qualifications and the automatic Pricing is available:

  • Non-Commercial: The (older) manually imported non-commercial Perpetual Licenses in BSS must be deactivated.
    After running the Get Services Definition action, depending on the defined countries of your BSS Microsoft instance, our system will automatically create every available non-commercial Perpetual License in BSS along with its cost and sell prices, for you to resell.

  • Commercial: The (older) automatically imported commercial Perpetual Licenses in BSS will be automatically updated by interworks with the latest changes in terms of their updated Qualification (segment) Code and the automatic Pricing functionality. After the update is completed by interworks, you will have to run the Get Services Definition action once more to receive the changes.

(tick)The first thing that customers need to do after the release note 3.28.65 is out, is to activate the currencies they want on their Perpetual Licenses products on the respective Microsoft instance (on the newly introduced Active Currencies selection field), then Save the instance and finally run the Get Services Definition process. This is of utmost importance in order for the changes of the automatic pricing of Perpetual Licenses to be applied to the existing Microsoft instances.


(question) Elaboration of the above "Informative Important Note for Existing customers of Perpetual Licenses"

  • The Qualification (segment) Code (SEG00X) will be automatically added by interworks to the existing commercial Perpetual License multi-selected values for the product SKUs. However, the code of the existing Perpetual License products will not be affected in any way, since many customers have inserted their own internal codes and we do not want to tamper with those.

  • Also, automatic pricing will be utilized for the existing Perpetual License products previously created by the Get Services Definition process and their description and code will be updated accordingly.

  • Beware that this migration process will not happen for Perpetual License products that are now discontinued by Microsoft and for products that were manually created (not created via the Get Services Definition).


Initial Configuration of Microsoft Instance for Perpetual Licenses 


After the release note 3.28.65, certain new features and improvements have been implemented for the Perpetual Licenses, one of which is found inside the Microsoft Service Manager instances.
By navigating to BSS Setup > Administration > System Options > Applications Setup and clicking on the Microsoft Cloud Services settings button, you are transferred to the Microsoft Service Manager instance(s). On this page, a new field on each Microsoft instance is added, called Active Currencies, which is currently used only for the implementation of the Perpetual License. You can select to activate certain currencies per instance (from the already enabled Organization currencies), based on which the Perpetual License products of that instance will be created and receive automatically their cost and sell prices.

For example, in the following screenshot, the Perpetual License products of the displayed instance, will be created via the Get Services Definition action, with the currencies “EUR” & “ILS“ activated, where EUR will be the default currency. Also, upon hovering over the question mark icon  you can be informed about the functionality of the field.


Rw ui textbox macro
typeinfo

Perpetual Licenses Market Country Rules

The defined countries inside the field Country along with the defined currencies inside the Active Currencies field specify the market availability and the automatically assigned pricing for the Perpetual Licenced products.

Active Currencies of BSS Organization During the “Get Services Definition” Process

During the Get Services Definition process all the activated currencies of the BSS organization are not automatically activated on all the Perpetual License products of this Microsoft instance, since these currencies need to also be defined on the respective field called Active Currencies inside that Microsoft instance.


Microsoft Perpetual Licenses Product Type


The Get Services Definition process on the Microsoft Cloud Services Instance, will trigger the creation of the Microsoft Perpetual Licenses product type. Therefore, these services will now appear on the list of services to create/update on the confirmation pop-up that appears upon initiating the Get Services Definition process via the corresponding action button.


The Perpetual License products are one-off products, meaning that they will be handled as assets in our system. For managing the Perpetual Licenses, we have utilized the asset type called "Licenses".

The product type that is created during the Get Services Definition process for the Perpetual Licenses is the one called Microsoft Perpetual Licenses. 

This product type has just two properties called Perpetual License SKU and Qualification, respectively.


 

The Perpetual License SKU property is a list containing all the available Perpetual Licenses where under the Value column is the title of the SKU with its qualification suffix (Commercial, Education, Government Community Cloud, Non-Profit) in a parenthesis, and under the Code column is the combination ProductID:SKUID:SegmentID as defined in the Microsoft API for each Perpetual License. The SegmentID part of the Code was added to distinguish the four qualifications for each Perpetual License service.

Segment ID Mapping Table Per Qualification

Segment ID

Qualification

SEG0001

Commercial

SEG0002

Education

SEG0003

Non-Profit

SEG0004

Government Community Cloud


The Qualification property is a list containing the four Perpetual License product qualifications, that define the ability to purchase and use those perpetual licenses, depending on the type of your established organization entity in Microsoft. These four qualifications are the Commercial, the Education, the Government Community Cloud, and the Non-Profit. Every Perpetual License asset, upon its creation in the BSS, will have automatically and by default the Qualification characteristics assigned to it based on the provided countries*. Under the Value column is the title of the qualification and under the Code column is the actual qualification.

;;;

Rw ui textbox macro
typenote

* Default Qualification of Perpetual License Products Are Based on Defined Countries

The Perpetual License products that are being automatically created via the Get Services Definition process are assigned their qualification characteristics based on the countries selected under the Microsoft Service Manager settings since each country might offer all four qualifications or some of them.

Image RemovedImage Added


Microsoft Perpetual Licenses Products


The Get Services Definition process imports/updates automatically in your BSS the Perpetual Licenses that you are eligible to resell along with their respective Qualifications and Prices.  

The products that will be returned will be the superset of the Perpetual License products that are available in the countries you have defined in the Microsoft Service Manager settings.
As you can witness, the Description/name of each Perpetual License product contains one of the following suffixes (Commercial, Education, Government Community Cloud, Non-Profit) depending on the Qualification it belongs to.

Rw ui textbox macro
typenote

Bundles in BSS Do Not Support Perpetual License Products

Bundles with Perpetual License products cannot exist due to the way the automatic pricing functions.


Products Prices

From the release note 3.28.65 and onwards, as we have previously mentioned, the Get Services definition process activates all the Perpetual License products, based on the activated currencies of your BSS organization as well as those currencies that are defined as Active Currencies in the respective field of each Microsoft instance in BSS, and sets both purchase and sell prices automatically by retrieving them both from Microsoft’s price list (for supported currencies) as well as from our Perpetual Licenses Currency Selection & Conversion tool (for unsupported currencies that a foreign exchange rate is defined). 

  • Since the prices are automatically imported to the Perpetual License products, you must not set them manually.

  • Concerning the automatically retrieved prices, the final pricing of a Perpetual License is calculated automatically during the ordering/checkout process based on the country of the customer (end-user) and the qualification of the product, since the prices in the Microsoft price list file are defined as a combination of currency and region. Microsoft follows this approach because for some countries it has different prices from the rest of the world. 

  • Moreover, Microsoft Perpetual Licences are charged only once on purchase-date. The pricing information we are collecting from Microsoft automatically is both the cost price (i.e what Microsoft charges you as a CSP) and the retail price. This means that you have the flexibility to bill your reseller and your customer either by setting a margin above your cost or by defining a discount for Microsoft's retail price, exactly as you do for the Office 365 plans.

  • If the prices that you wish to sell Perpetual License products are notsupported by Microsoft since they are not contained within Microsoft’s official currencies (from the price list), then a BSS tool named Perpetual Licenses Currency Selection & Conversion is provided. This tool calculates the correct prices for an unsupported Microsoft currency by utilizing the foreign exchange rate(s) that you will define against a Microsoft-supported currency. Therefore, in case you have unsupported currencies by Microsoft, you need to first define the Foreign Exchange rates for those currencies and then run the Get Services Definition process. The guide for this tool is located on the Tool for Unsupported MS Prices of Perpetual License Assets page.

Which Prices are displayed in the Storefront

The automatically assigned cost and sell prices on the Perpetual License products are automatically retrieved from either one or more countries (depending on the number of countries in your instance) and therefore, our systems (BSS and Storefront) initially display the maximum price for a given Perpetual License product, based on the higher price found among the pricelists of the countries selected on the respective Microsoft instance.

However, when the end customer is selected during the ordering process, the displayed and actual (payable) price will be corrected and displayed according to the end customer’s billing address.

Consequently, Perpetual License product prices during the creation of an order are displayed with their maximum value but before the execution of the order, the correct prices are displayed along with the respective unit (billing term), for the selected end-customer.

Rw ui textbox macro
typenote

Pricing of Discontinued Perpetual License Products

Automatic pricing does not support discontinued Perpetual License products and as such any pricing on such products is inaccurate.

Products Description

Our system will try to bring the descriptions of the Perpetual License products based on the catalog language that you have defined in the Microsoft settings, depending on whether Microsoft supports naming localization for the language you defined. If the language you have defined is not supported by Microsoft, the descriptions will be in English. Also, if you are reselling to more than one country, only the products that are available to the country that matches the selected language will be in this language, the rest will be in English.

Maintenance Process

The maintenance of the Perpetual License products and prices is very simple. Each month that you are running the Get Services Definition action, the list of available (commercial and non-commercial) Perpetual Licenses is updated along with the latest prices and for each one, the "catalog status" is updated.

Perpetual Licenses Custom Fields


When your reseller or customer purchases a Perpetual License product, our platform creates an asset record for keeping the details of the purchase. For this asset, we also keep the Microsoft's Perpetual License Order ID, the Perpetual License Order ID Alias, the Perpetual ID, and the Catalog ID. For keeping these two values the "Get Services Definition" action will also create four asset custom fields that will be utilized only for the Perpetual License assets. The definition of these fields can be found in BSS > Setup > Billing > Assets > Custom Fields.

Perpetual Licenses Unit


For the Perpetual License purchases, we are utilizing the unit called Licenses. This unit belongs to the Recurring Charge unit group and it will be used for defining the unit of the invoice items that are for the Perpetual Licenses. The specific unit group details page can be found under, BSS > Setup > Billing > Products > Unit Groups > Recurring Charge.



Table of Contents


Table of Contents
excludeTable of Contents