Activating Microsoft New Commerce Experience OLD

Owned by Oleg Melnykov (Deactivated)
Last updated: Feb 24, 2022 by Panagiotis Papanastasiou
7 min read

The Microsoft New Commerce Experience (NCE) products are managed by the same service manager we have implemented for the rest of the Microsoft Cloud Services. However, you need to first activate the New Commerce Experience (Technical Preview), choose the country you wish to sell NCE products to, and then save the changes and update the Microsoft Cloud Service Catalogue. This process will create in your BSS the Microsoft New Commerce Experience (NCE) products that you can later resell.

Enabling the Microsoft New Commerce Experience

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, a new section appears, named New Commerce Experience NCE. This new section is where the BSS user can enable the option to update his Microsoft catalog with the NCE products via the Get Services Definition process.

Before enabling the Enable New Commerce checkbox, the New Commerce Experience (NCE) section requires that you first specify the market country under the NCE Market Country field by choosing one of the enabled countries of your organization from the respective drop-down button.

What is the use of the NCE Market Country Field?

The availability for ordering NCE products will be delivered in 2 phases:

  1. Phase 1 (expected end December 2021): In phase 1, we will be able to collect the Microsoft cost and retail prices automatically only for a single market country which will be the country defined in this field. This means that you will be an excellent candidate to use the 1st version of the ordering if:

    1. You are selling only to end customers of a single country

    2. You are a European CSP, and you are selling to counties that are billed in euro currency. The latter is possible because for all the European countries the EUR prices are the same.

  2. Phase 2 (expected 22Q1): In this phase, we will fully comply with Microsoft’s pricing policy for charging each subscription using the end customer market prices. In this phase, our system will collect and apply automatically the correct prices based on end-customer country.

The NCE Market County field will be used for the 1st phase, and it will be removed when we move to phase 2.

After enabling the New Commerce checkbox and choosing the NCE Market Country, please click the Save button for the changes to take effect.

Microsoft New Commerce Experience Product Type

Once the New Commerce is enabled for a specific country, upon clicking on the Get Services Definition button, the process triggers the creation of the new product type named Microsoft Online Services (New Commerce).

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 284 new products of this Microsoft Online Services (New Commerce) product type 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, the product type created during the Get Services Definition process for the New Commerce Experience products is the Microsoft Online Services (New Commerce) and its product properties are the following.

  • MS Service Plan: This property is the MS Service Plan id for each NCE product, a unique ID that derives from the combination of the ProductID and the SKUID of that NCE product.

  • Subscription Type: This property is used to distinguish between base subscriptions and add-ons.

  • Product Family: This property specifies the group of products defined by Microsoft and contains one of the following values. Each NCE product is grouped under the respective group to be more easily found and ordered.

    • Microsoft 365

    • Dynamics 365

    • Power Platform

    • Windows 365

  • Enforced Attestation Type: This property is introduced so as to discern the NCE commercial products that require attestation, as described in the page: https://interworkscloud.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ICPD/pages/477004108

    This product characteristic can be either blank or filled in with the value Windows365, so that the BSS user knows whether the specific product requires attestation or not. The only attestation type that Microsoft now supports is the Windows365, so if the field is filled in, this means that the specific product requires this attestation.

    The BSS user can create a BSS report containing this product characteristic, so as to know beforehand for which products to activate the attestation via their Terms of Use option.

     

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 that you will be eligible to resell at a later date.

NCE products are active when created, even without an assigned price and with only the organization’s default currency enabled. Any subsequent call of the Get Services Definition process updates all NCE products and creates new products available since the last update.

 

Identifying NCE Products

The title/name of each New Commerce Experience product contains one of the following prefixes (D365/M365/POWERPLATFORM/W365) depending on the product family it belongs to, and the (New Commerce) suffix to identify them as New Commerce Experience 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.
Lastly, 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 a 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 and add-ons, based on your organization's default currency, and sets both purchase and sell prices to zero. For assigning the prices to the products, you should run the New Commerce Experience Pricing Tool that is analyzed under the https://interworkscloud.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ICPD/pages/533201017 page.

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 counties, 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 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 is updated and for each one, the "catalog status" is updated.