For updating your MS cloud services catalog with the changes Microsoft has done (e.g new or discontinued plans and add-ons), you must run the Get Services Definition in BSS Setup > Administration > System Options > Applications Setup > Microsoft Cloud Services > Settings. |
How often should I update my Microsoft Catalog? Microsoft updates its catalog every 1st of the month by introducing new offers and discontinuing old ones. So, we suggest running the update every 1st of the month for getting all the updates. |
This action will do the following:
It will create the MS Cloud services product types (if it's the first time you are running this action) or it will update them by adding the offer URIs of the new plans and add-ons in the correspondent product type attributes. The product types that will be created in your system will be the following:
These product types can be found in BSS Setup > Billing > Product Types
Each product type consists of 2 drop-down properties: one for the available plans and one for the available add-ons
Don't forget to rename your product types if you have activated multiple Partner Center accounts in your Cloud BSS If you have activated multiple Partner Center instances in your Cloud BSS, we suggest renaming your product types to match the correspondent partner center account for your ease of use. For every partner center you have activated, an identical set of product types is generated. We suggest to rename them using as a suffix the regional partner center account. Which product type is related with which partner center account can be found from the Related System field. |
The Get Services Definition will check Microsoft products and add-ons you have in your Cloud BSS and it will:
Categorize each new plan and add-on as government, nonprofit, education and commercial plan. This information is kept in "Qualification" property and the available values are "Education", "Nonprofit", "GovernmentCommunityCloud" and empty value for the commercial plans.
A plan can belong to more than one category and in this scenario the values are separated with "," (e.g. "Education, Nonprofit"). |
Upon completion of the process, you will be informed what changes have been applied to your catalog from the following pop-up:
The pop-up displays 3 links:
These links are actually links to system views we added in products module. In BSS > Billing > Products List you can find these links in View drop-down
For supporting these new system filters and for being able to use our reporting engine for finding these updated products, we introduced the Catalog Status field for the products. This field can have one of the following values: New, Updated, Discontinued or Unchanged.
When does the catalog status change? The catalog status of the products and add-ons changes every time you run the Get Services Definition action. The status is reset every time you run the automatic update process for denoting what are the changes from the last update. So, if you run the update process two successive times, the second time the status of a new product will change to unchanged since there will be no difference for this product between the two runs. |
When the update process is complete, the system adds in the Setting's page a note with the Last Update date and time. This information is also displayed in the Get Services Definition pop-up page.
This information is important for avoiding any unnecessary updates that will reset the catalog status of the products.
You can proceed by learning how to manage the updated products