The non-profit, education, and government plans cannot be purchased from customers that are not qualified for this kind of plans. If the customer is not eligible to purchase a non-profit plan, the checkout process will stop in both BSS and Storefront, and the customer will be informed that he cannot purchase this plan.

Check the "Sell to specialized industries" for more details on how your resellers and your customers can be qualified for special pricing.

Plans and Add-ons Categorization

Each Office 365 plan and add-on is categorized as non-profit, education, government, and commercial plan when they are imported or updated from the "Get Services Definition" process. 

• Plans with an empty value for the "Qualification" property. These are the commercial plans and anyone can purchase them.
• Plans with a specific value for the "Qualification" property. These plans can be purchased only from customers that have the same qualification.
  
  

Vetting Process for Education Plans

Microsoft has discontinued the Authorized Education Partner program introduced a new process for customers pursuing the 'Education' qualification in order to facilitate and simplify the transaction of Academic-priced offers and products by our resellers. As a result, the Education reseller qualification for CSP partners is no longer required. Instead, they have Microsoft has introduced a vetting process where the status is reflected (near real-timewithin 3 business days) in the customer’s Microsoft Partner Center account screen.

When a direct customer or a reseller (for personal use or reselling) places an order for an "Education" plan or add-on, our system initiates the vetting process for the customer's qualification using the improved MS API. Then Microsoft performs a validation to examine the customer's eligibility for purchasing an education plan. As long as the vetting process from Microsoft lasts (it is not instant), there is an intermediate stage called "in review" where the direct customer or the reseller cannot continue the order because it is in a"review state". After this "review state", if the customer is eligible, his status gets updated in the Microsoft Partner Center (MPC) account and the order continues normally, with a success message as a response from Microsoft. At the same time, a success message appears on our systems (either BSS or Storefront) indicating that the order is allowed. However, if the customer is not eligible for purchasing an "Education" plan, based on Microsoft's checks, the order stops, and the respective failure message from Microsoft is received. At the same time, a warning message appears on our systems (either BSS or Storefront) indicating the reason for failure.

More specifically, concerning the vetting process for an "Education" plan:

• If the tenant's account in MPC has already been assigned with the "Education" qualification, then the order for that tenant continues normally with a success message.
• If the tenant's account in MPC has no assigned qualification, the MS API applies the "Education" qualification to the tenant's account in MPC. After Microsoft has performed the eligibility check, the order is either accepted with a success message or not accepted, resulting in a stop and a failure message.
• If the tenant's account in MPC has already been assigned with other qualifications, then the order stops with a failure message; since once the qualification is set once, it becomes irreversible.

For more information concerning the improved MS API, in terms of the new GET and POST qualifications APIs to support accurate data entry and improve the Education customer validation process by Microsoft and the vetting process, please examine the following Microsoft links:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/announcements/2020-august#8
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/develop/get-customer-qualification-synchronousFor more information regarding this new process of becoming a Microsoft Education (qualification) customer, please check theMicrosoft Educational Qualification Guide page.

Ordering Process For Resellers

The ordering process is similar to the commercial plans process, with an extra check to determine whether the reseller's end-customer is eligible for the selected plan. If the end - customer is not eligible, the following warning will be displayed at the "Service Details" step (for new customers) or in the "End-Customer" step (for already synced customers) and the process will stop:

Ordering Process for Direct Customers

For the direct customers, the qualification check is performed on the basket's first page, and the message is displayed at the top of the basket page.

Placing an Order in BSS

The qualification check is performed when a new order is executed or when a new subscription is created manually from a BSS user. In both cases, the process stops if the selected customer is not eligible for purchasing this plan, and a warning message is displayed.

Translation of Warning Messages

For translating the warning messages, you can use our /wiki/spaces/ICPD/pages/4662868. 

The messages that must also be translated inside the Translation Tool, for the "Education" vetting process of Microsoft, are the following:

Subscription