Activating Perpetual Licenses

 

The Microsoft Perpetual Licenses are managed by the same service manager we have implemented for the rest of Microsoft cloud services. So, you must run the Updating the Microsoft Cloud Services Catalogue process for activating the Perpetual Licenses in your BSS. This process will create in your BSS the Microsoft Perpetual License products that you can resell.

We fully support all Perpetual Licenses qualifications and the pricing rules introduced by Microsoft:

  1. All Perpetual Licenses qualifications are fully supported: The Commercial, Education, Government Community Cloud, and Non-Profit qualifications are fully supported by our platform and a distinct set of products is created automatically for each qualification.

  2. Automatic Upload of Perpetual License Products Prices: The existing integration of Perpetual Licenses now supports the automatic retrieval and assignment of prices to Perpetual License products, without the need for manual price import.

  3. Prices are calculated automatically based on the end customer’s country and currency: Perpetual License product prices during the creation of an order are displayed with their maximum value but before the execution of the order, the correct prices are displayed for the selected end customer.

  4. Conversion Tool for Unsupported Microsoft Currencies: For currencies that are not officially supported by Microsoft we offer a user-friendly currency conversion tool in which foreign exchange rates can be created and stored so as to support those currencies while reselling Perpetual License products.

Define the Currencies for your Perpetual Licenses 


Before running the Get Services Definition action for updating your system with the Perpetual Licenses products, you must first define in which currencies you are selling them. This is required for the update action to update the prices for all the currencies.

By navigating to BSS Setup > Administration > System Options > Applications Setup and clicking on the Microsoft Cloud Services settings button, you are transferred to the Microsoft Service Manager instance(s). On this page, a new field on each Microsoft instance is added, called Active Currencies, which is currently used only for the implementation of the Perpetual License. You can select to activate certain currencies per instance (from the already enabled Organization currencies), based on which the Perpetual License products of that instance will be created and receive automatically their cost and sell prices.

For example, in the following screenshot, the Perpetual License products of the displayed instance will be created via the Get Services Definition action, with the currencies “EUR” & “ILS“ activated, where EUR will be the default currency. Also, upon hovering over the question mark icon  you can be informed about the functionality of the field.

 

Microsoft Perpetual Licenses Product Type


The Get Services Definition process will trigger the creation of the Microsoft Perpetual Licenses product type. Therefore, these services will now appear on the list of services to create/update on the confirmation pop-up that appears upon initiating the Get Services Definition process via the corresponding action button.


The Perpetual License products are one-off products, meaning that they will be handled as assets in our system. For managing the Perpetual Licenses, we have utilized the asset type called "Licenses".

The product type that is created during the Get Services Definition process for the Perpetual Licenses is the one called Microsoft Perpetual Licenses. 

This product type has just two properties called Perpetual License SKU and Qualification, respectively.


 

Perpetual License SKU Property

The Perpetual License SKU property is a list containing all the available Perpetual Licenses.

  • The Value column is the name of the SKU with its qualification suffix (Commercial, Education, Government Community Cloud, Non-Profit) in a parenthesis

  • The Code column is the combination ProductID:SKUID:SegmentID as defined in the Microsoft API for each Perpetual License. The SegmentID part of the Code was added to distinguish the four qualifications for each Perpetual License service.

Segment ID Mapping Table Per Qualification

Segment ID

Qualification

SEG0001

Commercial

SEG0002

Education

SEG0003

Non-Profit

SEG0004

Government Community Cloud


Qualification Property

The Qualification property is a list containing the four Perpetual License product qualifications, that define the ability to purchase and use those perpetual licenses, depending on the type of your established organization entity in Microsoft. These four qualifications are the Commercial, the Education*, the Government Community Cloud, and the Non-Profit.
Since we create a distinct set of products per qualification, this property is used for understanding the product’s qualification.

*For more information concerning the new process of becoming a Microsoft Education (qualification) customer, please check the page.

Watch the video on perpetual license product types below:

 

Microsoft Perpetual Licenses Products


The Get Services Definition process imports/updates automatically in your BSS the Perpetual Licenses that you are eligible to resell along with their respective Qualifications and Prices.  We create a distinct set of products per qualification,

The products that will be returned will be the superset of the Perpetual License products that are available in the countries you have defined in the Microsoft Service Manager settings.

We create a distinct set of products for each qualification and the name of each Perpetual License product contains one of the following suffixes (Commercial, Education, Government Community Cloud, Non-Profit) depending on the qualification it belongs to. As product code, we set the code of the related Perpetual License SKU property.

Products Prices

The Get Services definition process updates the prices for all the currencies you have defined as Active currencies in the respective field of each Microsoft instance in BSS. It sets both purchase and sell prices automatically by retrieving them:

  • For the supported currencies, from Microsoft’s price lists. We collect the prices from all the countries you have defined in your instance and we set as default purchase and sell price for a product the higher price found among the pricelists of the countries.

  • For the unsupported currencies, we are using the exchange rate defined for each unsupported currency in the Perpetual Licenses Currency Selection & Conversion Tool. This tool calculates the correct prices for an unsupported Microsoft currency by utilizing the foreign exchange rate that you will define against a Microsoft-supported currency

Which Prices are displayed in the Storefront

The prices we display in the Storefront are the prices collected by the Get Services Definition. However, when the end customer is selected during the ordering process, the actual (payable) price will be corrected and displayed according to the end customer’s billing address.

Consequently, Perpetual License product prices during the creation of an order are displayed with their maximum value but 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 the Perpetual License 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 Perpetual License products and prices is very simple. Each month you run the Get Services Definition action, the list of available (commercial and non-commercial) Perpetual Licenses is updated along with the latest prices, and for each one, the "catalog status" is updated.

Perpetual Licenses Custom Fields


When your reseller or customer purchases a Perpetual License product, our platform creates an asset record for keeping the purchase details. For this asset, we also keep the Microsoft's Perpetual License Order ID, the Perpetual License Order ID Alias, the Perpetual ID, and the Catalog ID. For keeping these two values the "Get Services Definition" action will also create four asset custom fields that will be utilized only for the Perpetual License assets. The definition of these fields can be found in BSS > Setup > Billing > Assets > Custom Fields.

Perpetual Licenses Unit


For the Perpetual License purchases, we are utilizing the unit called Licenses. This unit belongs to the Recurring Charge unit group and it will be used for defining the unit of the invoice items that are for the Perpetual Licenses. The specific unit group details page can be found under, BSS > Setup > Billing > Products > Unit Groups > Recurring Charge.