Activating the Price Protection for a Single Subscription

If a subscription is eligible for being added under price protection, the action "Activate Price Protection" will be available in Shortcuts menu.

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By pressing this action, the subscription will be added under price protection following the rules described in paragraph How the Price Protection Parameters are Set.

Activating the Price Protection for Multiple subscriptions (bulk action)

A bulk activation of the price protection for your subscriptions is available from the subscriptions lists. The process is described below:

1. Define the set of subscriptions you want to update. Create a new filter or use the advanced search option for defining your search criteria. For example, for finding all Microsoft subscriptions that are not under price protection, you should search for active or suspended subscriptions that "Is Under Price Protection" = No and the product is a Microsoft product.
   
2. If you want to update only some of the subscriptions that are included in the search results, select them by checking the checkbox at the beginning of each line.
3. Select "Actions > Activate Price Protection"
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4. A pop-up will be displayed for defining whether you want to run the action for the whole result set or only for the selected subscriptions.
   In the paradigm below, the option "update selected records" will update only the 3 selected subscription, but the option "Update the whole list" will update all 64 subscriptions that are included in the results set.
   Note: If no subscriptions have been checked, only the option "Update the whole list" is available.
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5. The bulk update is executed asynchronously with the use of a queuing mechanism. For checking the progress of the activation, the user should check the activation logs. These logs are accessible:
   1. From the pop-up that is displayed after the user selects the option he wants.
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   2. From the menu "Actions > View Logs"
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Price Protection Activation Logs

The logs page displays one line per bulk activation action. For each action, the following information is displayed

• Name: It is the link to log details.
•  Status: The available statuses are the following:
  • Pending: The action hasn't been started yet.
  • In progress: The action is in progress.
  • Completed successfully: The action completed and for all subscriptions the price protection was activated successfully.
  • Error occurred: The action completed but there is at least one subscription that failed. In this case, you should check the log details for finding out which subscriptions failed and why.
• Progress: The execution progress in percentage.
• Comments: It displays a summary of the execution results summarizing how many subscriptions were updated successfully and how many failed. For example: "Subscriptions that were successfully updated: 13. Subscriptions that failed to be updated: 10."
• Created by: The user that ran the activation action
• Created at: When the execution of the action started.
• Updated: The last time the logs were updated. When the progress is 100%, it is the completion time.

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Log Details

For each bulk action, the detailed logs are available if you press the "name" link. In the detailed logs, there is one line per subscription with the following information:

• Name: A link to the subscription details page.
• Status: It will be "completed" for successful activation of the price protection or "error occurred" for failed activation.
• Comments: For successful activations the value is "success". For failed activations, this field is used for displaying the error message.
• "Created At" and "updated": When the price protection activation process started and ended for this subscription

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Error Messages

If the activation of the price protection fails for a subscription, one of the following error messages will be added in the comments field.

• Cancelled subscription → "Error occurred: Cancelled Subscription"
• Inactive subscription → "Error occurred: User Defined Price"
• Subscription with user-defined price → "Error occurred: User Defined Price"
• The subscription product does not have price protection (i.e. terms = 0) → "Error occurred: The product does not support price protection"
• The subscription is already under Price protection → "Error occurred: Is Under Protection"
• The subscription is not synchronized with Microsoft (no external ID) → "Error occurred: External Id is missing"
• The subscription has an invalid external ID → "Error occurred: Problem with partner center"
• The account is not synchronized with Microsoft (no external ID)→  "External Id for Lease with property AccountId : <Account_Id> was not found"
• The subscription is a trial subscription → "Error occurred: Trial Subscription"
• The subscription is not for a Microsoft product → " Error occurred : Subscription with property LeaseId : <SubscriptionID> is not a subscription for Microsoft product"

How the Price Protection Parameters are Set for a Subscription

The price protection is activated for an existing subscription using the following rules:

• Price Protection End Date: For calculating the renewal date for the price protection period, we are calling Microsoft API for getting subscription's effective date and we apply product's terms (e.g. 12 months). With this approach, the price protection end date we are keeping in our system is aligned with Microsoft date.
• Protected Sell Price: It will be always subscription's unit price
• Protected Cost Price:
  • The subscription is related with a pricelist that the pricing rule is margin/markup above the cost: In this scenario, we will calculate the protected cost price by applying using pricelist margin/markup and subscription's final unit price. For example, if a subscription has final until price = $10 and it's related with a price list with 5% margin → protected cost price = final unit price * (1 - margin) = 10 * 0.95 = $9.5
  • For all the rest scenarios, the protected cost price will be the current cost price of the product.