We are pleased to announce the availability of New Commerce Experience (NCE) Public Sector Trials, following the introduction of trials for commercial use with the 3.28.91 release. In this update, Microsoft Indirect Providers and Microsoft Direct CSPs can utilize the Trials feature to promote the NCE Public Sector Trials to their customers.

With this feature, you can:

• Automatically update your product catalog with the Public Sector Trial availability on a product level.

• Promote NCE Trials for Public Sector organizations through your Storefront.

• Allow your Resellers/ Customers to automatically activate & get a non-auto renewed Trial NCE Subscription through your Storefront.

• Allow the Trial to end and purchase a new subscription, to get any promotion available by Microsoft and have the option to decide on the number of licenses and the billing term.

🚀 Activation: After this release 3.28.183, you have to run the 'Get Services Definition' (GSD) process for all Microsoft Cloud Services Service Manager instances, to make the Billing Term functionality available during scheduling changes for both the Storefront and BSS portals.

Important Action: After the aforementioned Activation note, you also have to enable the respective notification email called ‘Public Sector Trial Subscription Provisioning Failure’ by navigating to BSS Setup → Administration → Notifications → Customer Notifications → Subscriptions, for the notification to be available and notify the responsible BSS user in case a Public Sector (NCE) Trial subscription failed to be created.

We are excited to introduce a new system notification called “Subscription Auto-Renew Status Change.” This email notification improves the experience for responsible BSS users by ensuring they are promptly informed of any changes their customers make to the subscription's auto-renewal status.

Value: This notification increases awareness and transparency, allowing responsible BSS users and BSS account managers to avoid mistaken or unexpected Auto-Renew status changes of their customer subscriptions, and easily track such changes through automatically dispatched notification emails and automatically generated comments in the BSS > History Section.

How it Works: This system notification automatically informs responsible BSS users and BSS account managers via email when the auto-renewal status of a subscription is changed, detailing the new status, date, time, and user involved. Additionally, changes made via the Storefront generate comments in the BSS > History Section, streamlining subscription management and ensuring transparency.

🚀 Activation: This notification email Subscription’s Auto-renew Status Change Notification needs to be enabled via the BSS Setup → Administration → Notifications → Customer Notifications → Subscriptions.

Following Microsoft’s updated support for scheduled changes of End Of Sale (EOS) Microsoft product subscriptions, we are excited to announce our full support and alignment. Starting from 10th March 2025, customers will have the option to change the Billing Frequency and the Quantity of their discontinued (EOS) Microsoft product subscriptions in our platform, but they will not be able to schedule a change for the Billing Term. This means that once the Manage Renewal pop-up window is opened, the users should only change the values of the Billing Frequency and the Quantity, without altering the default Billing Term value.

The following issues were addressed, with fixes applied where necessary:

1. Incorrect Invoice Dates - Issue Resolved: We have resolved an issue where invoices had incorrect billing period dates due to an issue in installment calculations, especially after double upgrades. The algorithm has been updated to use the start date of the first installment as the reference point instead of the end date of the last installment. This fix ensures accurate billing periods and prevents generation of invoices with incorrect dates.

2. Incorrect Installments During Subscription Upgrades - Issue Resolved: We have resolved an issue where subscription upgrades incorrectly created multiple installments instead of the intended two. The issue arose during a double upgrade scenario. We have adjusted the algorithm to calculate installments from the start date of the first installment instead of the end date of the last installment. This fix ensures accurate billing dates and installment counts. Additionally, we resolved a related issue affecting the charge rate of the first installment during partial upgrades.