How to Retrieve Direct CSP Tenants & Initiate Import for Customers

After selecting the corresponding instance as well as the one or mass customer import option, and subsequently clicking the Get Hierarchy button, the tool retrieves the instance's Direct CSP MS tenants by obtaining only those subscriptions from which there is no MPN ID present and displays them on the following table list under the columns: 

• Check-boxes: Are used either for distinct selection of one or more tenants or for selecting all tenants at once.
  If an import is under the Status: Completed / In Progress / Pending, there will be no checkbox for selection. In the event that a Microsoft tenant in the Microsoft Partner Center does not have a BSS account, nor a subscription, the checkbox will be available in order to create that tenant as a BSS account into the BSS platform; even if no subscriptions are available for import.  
• Type: The Type of Direct CSPs is Customer.
• Reseller / Customer Name: This column displays the Microsoft Partner Center tenant's name. You are able to use filtering.
• Related BSS Account: During the import of one or more MS Tenants from this list, BSS accounts are generated and become associated to the respective MS tenants.  Therefore, a link will be created by the importer and depicted under the field Related BSS Account. The BSS account name will obtain the customer's name. The field will hold a link value only when the account was created by the importer. When the link is clicked, you will be redirected to the account's view page. As long as an MS tenant is not imported, this field will be empty. It should be noted that there is no synchronization from BSS, which means that if there is a BSS account related to a tenant id,  "Related BSS Account" will be empty. There will be no filtering for this column because the entities are links. 
• Customer Identifier: This column displays the Microsoft Partner Center account's id of the customer. You are able to use filtering.
• Country: This column has the corresponding Country of MS tenant, which is collected from the tenant's Billing Address. You are able to use filtering.
• Mpn Id: This column is empty for Direct CSPs, since there is no MPN ID related to them.
• End Customers: This column is empty for Direct CSPs, since there are no end-customers related to them.
• BSS Subscriptions (Available after the import): This column will obtain a value only when the import has run and there are imported subscriptions inside our BSS. It displays the number of subscriptions the import has created inside the BSS platform. You are able to use filtering.
• Not Imported Subscriptions: This column contains the existing subscriptions of the end customer in the Microsoft Partner Center, that do not exist in our platform. You are able to use filtering. 
• Status: Check table below:

Distinguishing New Customers From Existing Customers

New tenants (customers) in the table are denoted with the color white, in their row on the table. The green color denotes the customers that have already executed imports successfully, whereas the red color denotes customers who have executed imports, but with errors.

As you can witness from the above screenshot, the 3rd-row customer, marked in green highlight, is an existing customer with a related BSS account, and it has six synced BSS Subscriptions and seven Not Imported Subscriptions in the Microsoft Partner Center.
This means that seven subscriptions are not yet imported into the BSS, and that is why the checkbox at the beginning of the row is available, although the Status column indicates that the subscriptions are Synced.
The status is displaying the fact that seven out of the thirteen total subscriptions are Not Imported Subscriptions since this customer had successfully imported in the past six subscriptions into the BSS platform, while the checkbox indicates that more subscriptions can be added to BSS.
Therefore, by selecting the checkbox of the third row, the import tool will try to import to BSS the remaining subscription that currently resides only inside the Microsoft Partner Center. 

Configure Import Options for Direct CSP Tenants

Having selected one or more Direct MS tenant(s) to import, you select the Import Direct button. Then, depending on whether the chosen tenants are new or existing in the BSS platform, a pop-up window appears containing the Import Direct Options which consists of the Ordering Options as well as the Subscription Options that need to be configured for the chosen tenants, who are about to be imported. 

• If a new customer along with their subscription(s) is to be imported into BSS, meaning that their external account ID is not found in our platform, they will have all the Ordering & Subscription Options available to them for configuration.
• If the subscriptions of an existing customer are to be imported onto our system, the Ordering Options are deactivated and displayed at their default values while the Subscription Options are available, since the BSS account of the customer already exists by having their preselected ordering options, and these will not change via this tool. However, since the Subscription Options are available for existing customers with a BSS account, the BSS user can define a Price List for the subscription to be imported.
  

  In order to inform the users of the tool that these Ordering Options only apply to the creation of new customers while the Subscription Options apply to both use cases, two new messages are added under the Ordering and Subscription Options titles, stating:

  

1. For the import of new customers, under the Ordering Options you select the invoicing variables for those tenants about to be imported. The system can be configured to reflect multiple invoicing scenarios.
   
   
   

   Enable Billing Plans – Select whether to create billing plans for the BSS account, which can be used to make all future purchases. Enable this flag to allow your customers to purchase with payment plans and/or you already have subscriptions with payment plans in the MPC. Enabling this enables the checkbox Enable Prorate Billing for the account, as shown in the figure below:

   

   For more information on NCE Billing Frequency, please refer to the Billing Frequency page.

   For information on configuring the Ordering Options fields, please continue to the "Analysis of Ordering Options" page.
   
   

2. Under Subscription Options the user defines the following parameter:
   1. Price list: The price list that will be used for pricing the imported subscription in BSS. If no price list is selected in this field, then the pricing will be performed based on the default sale price of the products. 

Import of New & Existing Customers Simultaneously

When multiple tenants(customers) are being imported at the same time, chances are that some of them are existing customers with new subscriptions, and some of them are new customers with new subscriptions. Since mass import is a very common business scenario, the tool can easily distinguish which of the tenants are existing and which ones are new, in order to correctly apply the selected Ordering Options on them or not.

So if at least one of the selected customers is a new one, the Import Options will be unlocked and editable, as seen in the screenshot below, and these options will apply only to the new customer, as discussed above.

After the configuration of the above-mentioned options, you can either proceed with the import process by clicking the Start Import button or exit the pop-up windows by clicking the "X" (close) button and return to the Direct MS tenant's list.

Initiate the Import Process (Direct CSP)

After defining the above steps and once you have clicked the Start Import button, the actual import process begins its execution inside our BSS platform.

During this phase, you get informed with a pop-up message writing "Import process has been initiated, you can see the progress in the Import Results page.".

When you close the pop-up window, you remain on the same MS tenant's List. Accounts that have been selected for import will not have a checkbox, and their status will be updated during the import process. 

In case an MS tenant (customer) has been imported with errors (e.g. fail on subscription import), the entry will become red-colored, although its status will be "Synced", as exemplified below.

In order to correct the error(s) you can go to the "Import Results Page" and from there, navigate to the customer's import that was completed with errors in order to click the name under the column Type from which the below pop-up window appears. By clicking the black arrow (highlighted in green), you can expand and reveal the log of the import and examine the reason(s) of the error(s) in detail (highlighted in yellow), as exemplified below. 

For the import results of Direct CSP tenants, you must continue on to the "Import Results Page" page.