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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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 Copy of 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.

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.