Automatic Creation & Update of Microsoft ‘New Commerce Experience’ Offerings

By navigating to BSS Setup > Administration > System Options > Applications Setup > Microsoft Cloud Services and clicking on the Settings button, you are redirected inside the Microsoft Cloud Services Service Manager where you can choose your preferred instance. Inside each Microsoft instance, you have to run the Get Services Definition process for the system to automatically create and/or update the Microsoft offerings in your catalog. Such offerings include the New Commerce Experience (NCE) products in the form of 'Commercial' and 'Public Sector' qualifications since now they are included by default inside the automated Get Services Definition process without requiring any other form of enablement or checkbox activation from the BSS user, as it was the case in the past, before the 3.28.139 release. The aforementioned NCE offerings are analyzed in detail below.

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Also, the New Commerce Experience (NCE) products, and prices are in full compliance with Microsoft’s pricing policy for charging each subscription using the end customer market prices. The countries considered for the New Commerce Experience are those defined inside the field Countries (located inside the related instance field). Our system will retrieve and apply automatically the correct prices based on the country of the end customer.

Microsoft New Commerce Experience Product Types

Upon clicking on the Get Services Definition button in the Microsoft Service Manager instance, the process triggers the creation of two new product types named Microsoft Online Services (New Commerce) and Microsoft Public Sector (New Commerce).

1. Microsoft Online Services (New Commerce): It creates/updates commercial ‘New Commerce Experience’ products and services in your Microsoft catalog.

2. Microsoft Public Sector (New Commerce): It creates/updates qualification-based (Education and Non-Profit) ‘New Commerce Experience’ products and services in your Microsoft catalog.

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Therefore, as the update process progresses, the NCE services will appear on the list of services to be created/updated on the following confirmation pop-up window.

All new products of this Microsoft Online Services (New Commerce) and Microsoft Public Sector (New Commerce) product types are handled as subscriptions and belong to the MS Cloud Services group. The name of the group is the name that the BSS administrator specified during the setup of the cloud app.

Furthermore, let’s further analyze the two product types created during the Get Services Definition process for the New Commerce Experience products are:

You can watch the video on the commercial NCE license-based product type below:

Automatic NCE Cancellation of Requests from Storefront

All Storefront cancellation requests for NCE subscriptions are automatically accepted (if they are within the cancellation window), since by default both Automatic execution of add-ons and subscription checkbox options are enabled. No request is created for the BSS user to accept.

Microsoft New Commerce Experience Products

The Get Services Definition process imports/updates automatically in your BSS the New Commerce Experience products (along with their prices) that you will be eligible to resell at a later date.

NCE products are active when created and automatically contain their prices (retrieved via the service manager) for all the activated currencies of the BSS organization. An exception to the rule, of the products that automatically contain their prices, are the Specialized Offers, which due to their nature have by default no price until you (the CSP) have agreed with Microsoft on the price of a specific specialized offer and then you have manually assigned the price to that specialized offer product inside the platform. Any subsequent call of the Get Services Definition process updates all NCE products and prices (except the prices of the Specialized Offers) and creates new products available since the last update.

Specialized Offers (NCE) Products

Specialized Offers are a New Commerce Experience capability where Microsoft enables customized offers for a specific (pre-qualified) set of partners to purchase.

These Specialized Offers are created to solve a particular partner's unique business situation needing special offers modeled for their circumstances. Therefore, each CSP has its own Specialized Offers as they have agreed with Microsoft. Considering each CSP has its own Specialized Offers, they are not available via any Microsoft price sheets or other offers. Moreover, each CSP can view and purchase the specialized offers they have agreed upon with Microsoft, via our Microsoft catalog, after running the Get Services Definition process in each Microsoft Service Manager instance. Once these Specialized Offer SKUs are available inside your Microsoft Catalog of our platform, you can locate them by their Product Family, and by clicking on them you must always check their unique Description, their term, and billing plan as they are highlighted in the screenshot above.

Before publishing these products in your Storefront, it is advisable to change their name to include the term as well as the billing plan of each Specialized Offer SKU that you intend to offer for purchase. e.g. annual/monthly payment or annual/annual payment

Of course, the Specialized Offers can also be found by utilizing the getSKU APIs but likewise, they can be found by accessing the Catalog in the Microsoft Partner Center next to the other offer types.

Identifying NCE Products

The title/name of each New Commerce Experience product contains one of the following prefixes (D365/M365/POWERPLATFORM/W365/SPECIALOFFER) depending on the product family it belongs to, and the (New Commerce) suffix to identify them as New Commerce Experience products.

Identifying Microsoft Public Sector vs Microsoft Commercial (Online Services) Products

When it comes to differentiating between the Public Sector New Commerce Experience (NCE) products and the Commercial NCE products, as well as between the two public sector qualifications of Public Sector NCE products, there are a few indicators to look out for:

1. The Product Type field, found on the Product view page of the BSS portal, is the key distinguishing indicator between the two NCE product types.

2. The Qualification field, found also on the Product view page of the BSS portal, is the second most important indicator because it differentiates the Educational Public Sector NCE products from the Non-Profit Public Sector NCE products.

Add-ons & Prerequisite Products

Add-ons in the New Commerce Experience (NCE) enable a partner to purchase additional services that complement and add functionality to a previously purchased product. Some examples of these are; calling plans, additional disk space, or other features that can be added if the customer already has the base offer.

Consequently, the NCE add-ons may appear as standalone, and when purchased, they create subscriptions on their own. However, the Microsoft tenant has to have an existing base subscription and that base subscription must function as the add-on's prerequisite product to proceed with the purchase of the add-on.

Moreover, the add-ons are displayed as products (in the BSS and in the Storefront) and not as add-ons as you may have been accustomed to.
Once a base product subscription exists and then an add-on (in the form of a product) is purchased, that is apparently connected to this (prerequisite) base product, their subscriptions remain two separate subscriptions, and not a combination of the two into one, as you may have been accustomed to.

Thus, add-ons will be and look exactly like the products. For this reason, a custom field is added, so that the BSS user can know whether an NCE product is an actual product or an add-on.

The prerequisites for an NCE add-on can be found in the catalog APIs for a given SKU and in the Microsoft Partner Center catalog user experience.

Prices for NCE Products & Add-ons

As we have previously mentioned, the Get Services definition process activates all the New Commerce Experience products (both the commercial and those from the public sector), based on all the activated currencies of your BSS organization, and sets both purchase and sell prices automatically by retrieving them both from Microsoft’s price list (for supported currencies) as well as from our New Commerce Experience Currency Selection & Conversion tool (for unsupported currencies that a Foreign Exchange rate is defined).

Since the prices for all the NCE products and add-ons (except the Specialized Offers) are automatically imported to the New Commerce Experience products, you must not set them manually. You can only set manually the prices of the Specialized Offers, if they are available to you, and after you have agreed with Microsoft.

If the prices that you wish to sell NCE products are not supported by Microsoft since they are not contained within Microsoft’s official currencies (from the price list), then a BSS tool named New Commerce Experience Currency Selection & Conversion is provided. This tool calculates the correct prices for an unsupported currency by utilizing the foreign exchange rate(s) that you will define against a Microsoft-supported currency.

Therefore, if you have unsupported currencies by Microsoft, you need to first define the Foreign Exchange rates for those currencies and then run the Get Services Definition process. The guide for this tool is located on the Tool for Unsupported MS Prices of NCE Products page.

Which Prices are displayed in the Storefront

The automatically assigned cost and sell prices on the NCE products are automatically retrieved from either one or more countries (depending on the number of countries in your instance) and therefore, our systems (BSS and Storefront) initially display the maximum price for a given NCE product, based on the higher price found among the pricelists of the countries selected on the respective Microsoft instance.

However, when the end customer is selected during the ordering process, the displayed and actual (payable) price will be corrected and displayed according to the end customer’s billing address.

Consequently, NCE product prices during the creation of an order are displayed with their maximum value. However, before the execution of the order, the correct prices are displayed, along with the respective unit (billing term), for the selected end-customer.

Products Description

Our system will try to bring the descriptions of all the New Commerce Experience products based on the catalog language that you have defined in the Microsoft settings, depending on whether Microsoft supports naming localization for the language you defined. If the language you have defined is not supported by Microsoft, the descriptions will be in English. Also, if you are reselling to more than one country, only the products that are available to the country that matches the selected language will be in this language, the rest will be in English.

Maintenance Process

The maintenance of the New Commerce Experience products (both the commercial and those from the public sector) follows the same rules that apply to Microsoft Office 365 plans. Each month that you are running the Get Services Definition process, the list of available New Commerce Experience products, along with their prices, is updated and for each one, the "catalog status" is updated.

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