Questions

Answers

Can a customer have both an annual and monthly subscription on Business Central to accommodate seasonal users 

Yes, you could have both a monthly term and an annual term subscription for the same seat-based offer at the same time with the appropriate number of seats in each term to accommodate seasonal employees. 

If a customer purchases a Business Central Essentials license on an annual term, pays monthly, and goes out of business after six months, why is the partner held financially responsible? 

In the NCE, the expectation will be that a customer chooses the better pricing on annual term offers, knowing that they’re committing to the full term.
If a customer is uncertain about committing to a year of payments or believes that they might need to stop using the subscription before the term’s end for financial reasons, seasonality of business, or other reasons, the customer should purchase the monthly term subscription option that allows the subscription to be canceled at the end of any month.  This is also important for partners when selecting customers that can buy annual plans. The NCE is an opportunity for partners to re-evaluate their credit risk rules and promote the monthly offers for customers that are unstable or risky in any way.

Scenario: Customer purchases an NCE seat-based SKU annual term, monthly payment, and changes partner after 6 months, will the liability be transferred to the new partner? 

The  transfer between partners scenario is not supported in the NCE. The customer can create different subscriptions to different partners or wait until the termination of the subscription with Partner A, to initiate a new subscription with Partner B.

I'm looking for specific directions on how to retrieve keys for my clients’ licenses. 

With the NCE subscriptions, no license keys are requested. If you are talking about Software Subscriptions, you can download license keys through the Partner Center.

How will the new system relate with the old one? 

Our cloud commerce platform is already supporting Traditional (Legacy) CSP partners since 2015. Our implementation is based on the existing integration , that our customers use to automate their Microsoft CSP business. We moved really carefully, so as to keep the current business untouched and proceed with many new additions and implementations to match all business and technical requirements set my Microsoft. Legacy and NCE will  co-exist for a while and at some point in the future, Legacy CSP as we currently know it, wiil be depreciated and NCE will be solely offered.

When do you expect to support monthly billing?

It is part of February release!

How do we mass add the NCE products to the pricelist?

You can either create price group(s), bulk assign products to pricegroups and then and assign the price group to a pricelist (https://interworkscloud.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ICPD/pages/4662990/Working+with+Price+Groups#Bulk-assignment-to-price-group)

 OR

 you can use the advanced search engine in the pricelist products import popup. Pls see the image below. 

With the new order notification email, will we have a variable to be inserted for the cancellation end date? 

Not yet, but is on our roadmap. Currently you can just insert the current day, so the message should be text only.

Is it possible to get notifications of Legacy subscription renewal dates sent out? So we know when they need to be migrated until it is possible within BSS?

You can either create a report and then export it to excel or create a custom notification inserting the current subscription end date as an information or event creating a rule based on that. 

With NCE cancellations, is it possible to schedule these after the 72hour windows when they're due to renew in however many months?

Yes, the scheduled cancellation and other changes  will be available with an upcoming release. 

Will be there a tool where the customer can transfer his legacy subscriptions to nce subscription without put manually every single subscription?

Not all legacy subscriptions can be migrated to NCE. For example, subscription with add-ons cannot be migrated to the NCE yet. This is something Microsoft does not currently support. We believe that a batch tool for the migration is not the best solution since for each subscription the customer needs to make some decisions such as: which will be the billing cycle of the new NCE subscription (annually / monthly), if he wishes to pay monthly his annual subscription etc.

How would Interworks handles these cancellations? Would they still allow the cancellations after 72-hours or will this option be grayed out?

This option will be grayed out, otherwise, you would be able to cancel the subscriptions in our platform that would still be active in the Partner Center.

So the billing still runs if suspended.  How do we 'block' or cancel a subsciptions that's not paid (but in a way that the partner won't be billed for it - so not 'suspend')?  It should be cancelled in 72 hours but what if not paid after the 72 hours and you want to block subscription and not be billed?

As per Microsoft's policy, the CSP Partner will continue to be billed by Microsoft for suspended subscriptions, even in cases of non payments. When a subscription is suspended, the customer cannot access the service, so this is the "tool" provided my Microsoft to push customers to pay.  Cancelation with prorated refund is available only within the first 72 hours, this is why, it is well supported that you should be carefull with your credit risks exposure.

When will there be an update in your documentation platform? (confluence) For training issues etc. 

Our Knowledge Base is currently updated with every process and feature is released to our platform and is documented here: https://interworkscloud.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ICPD/pages/532578969/Microsoft+New+Commerce+Experience+Integration. We are going to release videos as well, soon enough.

Do we need to set the invoice notifications email and template for NCE or does it take the CSP notifiication iteself? 

The invoice notification template is common and it is used for any invoice our system produces, regardless which services are billed. 

How the Sell to country is handled in the event we have a tenant reseller that sells in a different country? will they be blocked or will it take the country of the Main Tenant

The new pricing logic for multi-countries support will be released in February. We will come back with more details on your question.

In which BSS version, the Addons will be displayed before checkout?

Currently we do support the addons selling activities, but without having the info panel showing the interconnection between addons and primary products. It is scheduled to be implemented in NCE v5 (expected in March)

Does a Add On carry a 72HRS cancellation window as well?

Yes, it does.

Is the the current promotion available via BSS and Can BSS recon this automatically to the invoice

With the first version of promotions support, we display the promotion details in the subscription page in BSS, but we don't apply the discount automatically. The automated application of the promotional discount will be released within February.

Subscription will show billing cycle and subscription cycle ? I can see only Billing cycle. Now we can have the option of Annual renewal subs ( commitment ) but with monthly billing payment option. Please clarify.

Annual subscription purchases with monthly payments, will be supported within February.

• SKU code is different or same ?

• Product type is different or same ?

• Are we supposed to create new product groups or can add the items under existing product groups ?

Comparing to Legacy, SKU codes and Product Type are different.  You cannot assign an NCE product to a Legacy Product Group, since they do not share the same Product Type and this is an action available only for products within the same product type. 

For which timezone does the subscription will be based on? Reseller timezone ? Customer timezone or UTC ?

The creation of the timestamp we keep for each new NCE subscription is based on your organization's time zone. The cancellation window we be displayed to the Storefront user in the time zone of your organization.

The suspension capability when disabled, are there any delay to reactivate the services ? Or is it a live resuming ?

All provisioning actions (activation, increase, decrease, suspension, re-activation, cancellation) are live actions that work through our integration with Microsoft's APIs.

Hello, could you please help when migration tool from Legacy to NCE will be available?

It is scheduled to be released at the end of February.

Regarding the promos, how do we as direct partners receive the discount?

Promo discounts are applied to your cost price. 

When will monthly payment on annual terms be available?

They will be available in the February's release.

Will be there a tool available in interworks for moving legacy to nce?

Yes, we are planning to release a migration tool for transitioning Legacy subscriptions to NCE at the end of february

The promotions are not automated yet. when will this happen?

It is scheduled to be released at the end of February.

Is there a toggle available on the marketplace for deactivating the renewal of trials subscriptions?

Trials are not supported yet through our integration. This feature is scheduled to be supported within March.

When management of NCE subscriptions would be available from Storefront?

Currently, management of NCE subscriptions is available through Storefront. Specifically: Purchase, Increase, Decrease and Cancellation are the available actions. Upgrades and Scheduled Changes are going to be released within March and April following a phased approach. 

What happens when a final customer goes of of business and is bankrupt in the midst of a one year period. There is no possibility to cancel the subscription. So the financial risk is entirely on the final reseller now?

In the NCE, the expectation will be that a customer chooses the better pricing on annual term offers, knowing that they’re committing to the full term.
If a customer is uncertain about committing to a year of payments or believes that they might need to stop using the subscription before the term’s end for financial reasons, seasonality of business, or other reasons, the customer should purchase the monthly term subscription option that allows the subscription to be canceled at the end of any month.  This is also important for partners when selecting customers that can buy annual plans. The NCE is an opportunity for partners to re-evaluate their credit risk rules and promote the monthly offers for customers that are unstable or risky in any way.
So, the financial risk follows a chain  flow throughout the channel structure, starting from the root, meaning the CSP partner, going to the reseller and then the customer.
They are all held responsible to pay, but Microsoft will seek their payment from the CSP Partner, even in cases of non-payment from their resellers or direct customers. 

What happens if any customer don't migrate to NCE before the last due date.

The last due date to renew in the Legacy is the June 30th, 2022. Subscriptions that expire before that date can be renewed in Legacy or migrated to NCE.  Subscriptions that expire after the 30th of June, 2022  must be migrated in the NCE.  If you renew in legacy before the 30th of June, please keep in mind  that incentives  for Legacy subscriptions will be given until the 30th of December 2022.  Also, July 2023 is the final date for moving all remaining Legacy subscriptions to the NCE.

The promo prices are not applied via the price update API correct? The cost price and sell prices in BSS are according to CSP NCE pricelist in Partner Center, and no promo is applied to the pricelist. We have to manually calculate the cost price and also the promo price to customer?

Promotions are going to be automatically applied during purchase within February. Let’s see some facts:

1. The cost and sell price of products are automatically populated into the BSS, from the market country pricelist fetched through the API.

2. A promotion is discoverable only during purchase, where some criteria are met. The criteria I’m referring to, have to do with the customer’s region, the specific SKU, the duration term, the payment option and some other points that MS is checking.  We send all the above data to MS and receive the eligibility Y/N and the discount percentage. The logic here is that the promotion discount is an information that is coming from Microsoft during purchase.

3. Also, you may use BSS pricelists to control the sell price that a customer gets.

So, a subscription’s sell price and cost price will be finalized during checkout automatically and you do not have to calculate anything.