The NCE Subscription Record

For every NCE product License purchased by a customer, our system creates a subscription record. This record is the trigger for the provisioning mechanism, and it is related to the Microsoft subscription created in the Microsoft Partner Center. The subscription includes all the fields we have for a subscription and the properties specific to the NCE products.

Billing Cycles

The two available billing cycles for NCE subscriptions are either monthly or annual. Since all the NCE products are excluded from prorata, the billing cycles of those products will start upon their creation date. Consequently, the billing cycle is a full billing cycle based on the product unit, and the subscription end date is always calculated based on the start date of the subscription for a full period. 

For example, for orders placed on the last day of a month, the end date is calculated as follows:

• For months that have 31 days, the subscription end date will be on the 30th.

• For months that have 30 days, the subscription end date will be on the 29th.

• For February, which has 28 days, the subscription end date will be on the 27th in non-leap years. For a leap year, the subscription would end on the 28th.

Provisioning Status

Each NCE subscription has a provisioning sync status similar to the one we keep for the legacy subscriptions. This status can be either success or failed. The provisioning can be retried for the failed subscriptions by using the Retry button. Check Managing Subscriptions that Failed to be Provisioned for resolving failure scenarios.

1-1 Relation between BSS Subscriptions and Microsoft Subscriptions.

There were scenarios for the business licenses for the legacy subscriptions where you could have two or more BSS subscriptions linked with the same Microsoft subscription. This is no longer necessary for the NCE subscriptions because Microsoft has removed the restriction for the number of business subscriptions a tenant could have.

With this restriction out of the picture, our system always creates a new distinct subscription every time a new NCE subscription is created in our system. For enforcing this, we have also made unavailable the “Maintain Once Active Subscription…” option from the NCE product type.

Changing the Subscription Licenses

With the current release, you can only increase the NCE licenses of a subscription. Please proceed to the Buying Extra Licenses from Subscriptions Details Page page for a step-by-step guide.

Increase Licenses

On BSS, the licenses on an NCE subscription can only be increased. Also, only the immediate execution is currently available from the three main execution options (namely, the immediate, at a specific date, and at the end of the billing period). Consequently, when a BSS user requests an increase of the NCE subscription licenses, the following pop-up window will appear, with its execution type locked to the Immediate option.

Decrease Licenses

With the current release, the decrease in the quantity of NCE subscription licenses is currently not yet possible. In case a BSS user tries to decrease the number of licenses from an NCE subscription, a check mechanism will cut off the action, be displaying the following pop-up window, with an error message stating: ”Seat decrease is temporarily unavailable for this version.”

Canceling NCE Subscriptions

For New Commerce Experience offers, partners can immediately cancel their subscription(s), from both the BSS and the Storefront, with a prorated refund within the first 72 hours for any term (proration calculated daily) and on renewal of the subscription.
Therefore, purchased NCE subscriptions may be returned within 24 hours of purchase time for a full refund, while partial returns are applicable for cancellations of up to 72 hours since purchase or renewal time.

After 72 hours, cancellation is no longer available. The partner will be billed for the entire term, even if the customer stops paying for or using the subscription (applicable to any billing plan).

When a cancellation is complete, the customer will immediately lose access to the service, and the service can’t be restored and the state for the subscription will be nonrecoverable.

Upon renewal of the subscription, partners will get another 72-hour cancellation window to cancel their subscription for a prorated refund.

Cancellation of NCE Subscriptions via BSS

To cancel an NCE subscription via BSS all you have to do is click on the Cancel button, located under the Shortcuts menu of the subscription, and proceed with the overall cancellation process as usual. You can also notice on the upper part of the NCE subscription a convenient informative ribbon indicating the date and time until the cancellation of the subscription is possible. When the cancellation is still available then the color of the ribbon is blue whereas if the cancellation is not available the color of the ribbon changes to orange, as it is visible from the screenshot below.

Cancellation outside the 72 hours window is not possible. Suppose a BSS user tries to cancel an NCE subscription or a number of NCE licenses from a subscription outside the 72 hours window. In that case, our check mechanism will stop the cancellation action and will display an error message stating: “Cancellation was valid until <cancellation end date in BSS org’s timezome>“.

The subscription remains as-is, while its synchronization status and subscription status remain the same.

Cancellation of NCE Subscriptions via Storefront

The Storefront user is able to cancel an NCE subscription as a whole. That means that by selecting the I want to… button and choosing the Cancel the subscription option available on an NCE subscription, a new popup will appear, informing them of the number of seats they are about to cancel.

The Storefront user is only able to cancel the whole NCE subscription, not decrease seats. Therefore the seat number is locked and the effectiveness of the action is immediate and cannot be edited.

Once the cancellation is successful, the following message is displayed:

Failure of Cancellation

In case the subscription cancellation does not go through, because the cancellation is no longer available (72 hours have passed since subscription creation), the following message is being displayed on the upper right part of the page.

Right now, by default, the cancellation requests of NCE subscriptions get executed automatically. However, when the BSS user decides to change this on the NCE product type (from the BSS setup), the cancellation requests get created for the BSS user to accept. In this case, the BSS user, can view the NCE subscriptions with pending cancellation requests from the Pending Subscription Cancellation Requests widget on the BSS dashboard.

Cancellation View in Storefront

The Storefront user has a view of when the full cancellation of their NCE subscription is due, via the view page of the NCE subscription, under the Cancel until: title. The same date and time appear on Microsoft Partner Center (in the time zone of the Storefront user).

Note that if the Cancel until (cancellation end date) has passed, the date and time appear in red color.

Suspending NCE Subscriptions

Microsoft introduced for the NCE subscription a new suspension policy: Microsoft Partner can now suspend and then resume a new commerce subscription at any time without cancellation or termination;  Partner billing continues during the suspension.

We are fully aligned with Microsoft policy and a BSS user can suspend an NCE subscription and the action results in the subscription’s suspension on Partner Center as well. The service will continue to be billed from our system while the subscription is suspended.

Activate a Suspended Subscription

For our systems to be aligned with Microsoft, when a suspended NCE subscription gets activated again, the “Auto-Renew” option of the subscription turns off by default since Microsoft has the same implementation.

User Management (via Storefront Workspace)

The current version of the NCE integration does not support managing the user licenses from the users management facility we have introduced in Storefront’s workspace section. Currently, if a customer has purchased NCE licenses, the setup button redirects him to the Microsoft admin portal. It has been planned to be supported in one of the subsequent versions of the NCE integration.