Partner Attestation by Microsoft
- Panagiotis Papanastasiou
Microsoft runs on trust and is committed to providing a compliant, safe, and secure method of transacting customer subscriptions in the CSP program. Consequently, there is a new obligatory requirement from Microsoft concerning the orders steming from Indirect Providers of the CSP Program which is called Partner Attestation.
The Partner Attestation mandates that you have accepted it before the 22nd of February 2022 UTC. Please note that this is an obligatory requirement by Microsoft and you need to accept it in order to continue transacting in the CSP program. Otherwise, you will not be able to place orders to Microsoft either via the BSS and Storefront or from the Microsoft Partner Center. Also, your resellers and customers will not be able to buy any Microsoft Tier 2 instance products and will get a Partner Attestation error message prompting them to contact you.
You can also read the respective Announcement made by Microsoft.
Who Does It Concern
The obligatory requirement of the Partner Attestation concerns the CSP indirect providers who may be both direct and indirect partners.
Cloud environments are automatically updated on the 16th of February 2022 (you do not need to do anything about it).
On-premise customers should first update their installation with this patch, before accepting the Microsoft Partner Attestation.
Below, you can find further explanation of the Microsoft Partner Attestation as well as a guide on how to accept it.
Explanation of Microsoft Partner Attestation
In essence, Microsoft wants all Tier2 partners per transaction to confirm (via the acceptance of the Partner Attestation) that they act as a Direct (Tier1) partner in the absence of a reseller and as an Indirect (Tier2) partner in the presence of one, before the 22nd of February 2022 UTC.
From the introduction of the required Partner Attestation, the Microsoft Partner Center does not allow any purchase without an accepted attestation on each purchase, after 22/02/2022.
The same logic applies also to our systems since neither BSS nor Storefront will allow you to place orders without first accepting the Partner Attestation. This attestation covers all Microsoft Tier2 product transactions and orders from both the BSS and your Marketplace (Storefront). However, update actions of existing subscriptions do not require an attestation. We have prepared a special implementation within the interworks.cloud automation platform to allow you to follow Microsoft's policies and transact in the CSP program.
Accepting the Partner Attestation
You will need to accept the Partner Attestation on each of your Tier 2 Microsoft instances (not Tier 1), by the end of the 21st of February 2022, in order to transact in the CSP.
By navigating to BSS Setup > Administration > System Options > Applications Setup and locating the Microsoft Cloud Services Service Manager, you can click on the Settings button. From there, you have to click on the Review Partner Attestation for Indirect CSPs button, where a pop-up window is displayed with a detailed explanation of the Partner Attestation statement.
The Partner Attestation requires acknowledgment on behalf of the organization. Therefore, by clicking on the Review Partner Attestation for Indirect CSPs button, and accepting the attestation message, you affirm the following:
The Partner Attestation affects all purchases of products from this instance on both BSS and the Storefront.
By accepting the Partner Attestation:
For every purchase, I confirm that my organization is acting as an Indirect Partner when choosing a Reseller and as a Direct Partner in the absence of selecting a reseller.
After clicking on the Accept button, the Partner Attestation is in effect and all Microsoft Tier2 product transactions and orders from both the BSS and your Marketplace (Storefront) are allowed.
Next to the Review Partner Attestation for Indirect CSPs button, a tooltip icon exists which informs you (upon hovering over it) that the Partner Attestation is not required for instances with Direct (Tier 1) CSP Status.
Revoking the acceptance of the attestation is possible but strongly inadvisable, due to the repercussions of doing so. However, if for any reason, after the BSS user has accepted the Partner Attestation but clicks on the Revoke button, they are presented with a warning popup asking them if they are sure they want to revoke their Partner Attestation and reminding them of the repercussions of doing so.
Placing Orders Without Accepting the Partner Attestation
Both our platforms (BSS & Storefront) will stop any order or checkout actions (not updates) relating to Microsoft from Indirect Providers (Tier2) of the CSP Program if the Partner Attestation is not accepted. Therefore, the following actions for both platforms are prohibited until the attestation is accepted.
Prevented BSS Actions | Prevented Storefront Actions |
|---|---|
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Monitoring Partner Attestation Acceptances
In order to know exactly when the Partner Attestation was accepted or revoked and by which user, the Application Terms of Use - Logs is introduced as an added tool in the Tools section of the BSS setup.
By clicking on the respective tool name, the page of the tool loads, and the BSS user can select from the Application Instance drop-down menu button the Microsoft instance of their choice to check the accepted as well as the revoked Partner Attestations by clicking on the Run Tool button.
Consequently, the tool runs and displays the results in a table consisting of thirteen columns, and supports pagination depending on the number of results (25 per page).
The columns are the following:
Action: It displays whether the Parter Attestation is Accepted or Revoked.
Terms of Use: It displays the name of the attestation.
System Name: It displays the name of the service manager where the acceptance of the attestation occured.
System ID: It displays the id of the service manager where the acceptance of the attestation occured.
User First Name: It displays the name of the BSS user that accepted the attestation.
User Last Name: It displays the surname of the BSS user that accepted the attestation.
User Email: It displays the email of the BSS user that accepted the attestation.
Username: It displays the username of the BSS user that accepted the attestation.
URL: It displays the URL from which the accaptance of the attestation occured.
IP Address: It displays the IP address from which the accaptance of the attestation occured.
Browser: It displays the web browser from which the accaptance of the attestation occured.
Date: It displays the date and time of the BSS platform during which the accaptance of the attestation occured.
Date (UTC): It displays the date and time in UTC during which the accaptance of the attestation occured.
An Export To Excel button is also available for downloading to your machine all the results from all the page, having the exact same form as the table displayed in the tool.