Microsoft-led Migration: Key Dates and Information
Starting January 11, 2024, Microsoft will begin migrating automatically the active legacy commercial license-based subscriptions to the New Commerce Experience (NCE) subscriptions at the end of each subscription's term. The following graph illustrates Microsoft's Migration Milestones in 2024, starting from January 11th and continuing until the end of the year.
Important Points of Microsoft-led Migration
Microsoft-led migrations include only the legacy subscriptions that are active.
Subscriptions that don't migrate, renew but will eventually be retired or migrated later, depending on the circumstances.
If the base legacy subscription has migratable add-ons, both the base subscription and add-on subscriptions are migrated simultaneously.
After the migration, partners have 7 days to reduce seats or cancel the new NCE subscription.
The migration from legacy to NCE resets the term to annual, so the new commerce experience subscription is annual after migration.
3-year term legacy subscriptions are also included in the migration to 3-year NCE terms.
A new commerce experience promotion is applied to the created NCE subscription.
You can schedule a migration through the Partner Center. Microsoft detects existing scheduled migrations created by the partner but not yet executed and doesn’t create a Microsoft-led migration.
Microsoft-led Migration Process & Logic
Microsoft-led migration is created on the last day of the legacy subscription term, and is executed the day after the legacy subscription term ends.
Migration usually takes from zero to 6 hours. In some cases, it can take up to 72 hours.
The legacy subscription is set to a suspended state when the migration begins inside the Microsoft Partner Center.
During the period when the legacy subscription is suspended, no service loss occurs.
The start of billing for the NCE subscription aligns with the date the New Commerce Experience subscription was created if Microsoft successfully completes the migration.
No charges are made for the period where the legacy subscription was suspended without a corresponding NCE subscription created.
Once the migration is successfully completed by Microsoft in the Partner Center, the legacy subscription is then canceled since the newly created NCE subscription replaces it.
The interworks.cloud Solution
With our new automation, you can keep the subscriptions' data aligned with your Microsoft Partner Center while minimizing workload and operations burden. Here is a sneak peek into what you can expect from our solution, called Auto-Migration:
Once the migration is successfully completed by Microsoft in the Partner Center, our platform will automatically receive the respective data and validate them.
This newly created NCE subscription will be automatically imported into your BSS platform from your Microsoft Partner Center.
After the success or failure of the migration process, appropriate communication via email notifications is dispatched to the customers (and partners whenever applicable), informing them about the result of the migration process.
If a Migration fails, the legacy subscription within the BSS platform will remain active until further updates from Microsoft.
If a Migration is successful, the legacy subscription within the BSS platform will be canceled, and the newly imported NCE subscription from the Microsoft Partner Center will replace it.
Therefore, you and your customers do not need to take any action to support the Microsoft-led Migration, as our platform will handle it automatically by importing the newly created NCE subscription from the Microsoft Partner Center into the BSS platform and at the same time canceling the respective legacy commercial license-based subscription in the BSS platform.
What to Be Careful With
Be careful about the new annual term. If you need to avoid the annual term, you should migrate manually before the legacy subscriptions reach the end of the term.
Be mindful of the price you charge - ensure that all the NCE offerings are assigned to price lists in your BSS or have a pricing rule if you are working with the Standard Edition for Resellers.
Educate/Prepare your customers (on the new pricing & new cancellation rules of NCE).