The NCE Subscription Record

For every NCE product License purchased by a customer, our system creates a subscription record. This record is the trigger for the provisioning mechanism, and it is related to the Microsoft subscription created in the Microsoft Partner Center. The subscription includes all the fields we have for a subscription and the properties specific to the NCE products.

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Billing Cycles

The two available billing cycles for NCE subscriptions are either monthly or annual. Since all the NCE products are excluded from prorata, the billing cycles of those products will start upon their creation date. Consequently, the billing cycle is a full billing cycle based on the product unit, and the subscription end date is always calculated based on the start date of the subscription for a full period. 

For example, for orders placed on the last day of a month, the end date is calculated as follows:

• For months that have 31 days, the subscription end date will be on the 30th.

• For months that have 30 days, the subscription end date will be on the 29th.

• For February, which has 28 days, the subscription end date will be on the 27th in non-leap years. For a leap year, the subscription would end on the 28th.

Provisioning Status

Each NCE subscription has a provisioning sync status similar to the one we keep for the legacy subscriptions. This status can be either success or failed. The provisioning can be retried for the failed subscriptions by using the Retry button. Check Managing Subscriptions that Failed to be Provisioned for resolving failure scenarios.

1-1 Relation between BSS Subscriptions and Microsoft Subscriptions.

There were scenarios for the business licenses for the legacy subscriptions where you could have two or more BSS subscriptions linked with the same Microsoft subscription. This is no longer necessary for the NCE subscriptions because Microsoft has removed the restriction for the number of business subscriptions a tenant could have.

With this restriction out of the picture, our system always creates a new distinct subscription every time a new NCE subscription is created in our system. For enforcing this, we have also made unavailable the “Maintain Once Active Subscription…” option from the NCE product type.

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NCE Subscription Renewal

When an NCE subscription is renewed by the interworks.cloud Platform, the external pricing mechanism retrieves the new prices from Microsoft. If these prices fail to be retrieved, the subscription is renewed, but no invoice is issued and the subscription is locked.

Please note that the following actions cannot be performed for a locked subscription which has failed to be invoiced due to external pricing failure: 

Auto-Renewal Options for Customers

Storefront

Storefront users can select to have their subscriptions renewed automatically. To enable or disable auto-renewal, select the Auto-Renew toggle switch. When auto-renewal is enabled, the renewal date is displayed below the switch.

For more information, please see the page Subscription Auto-Renewal Management via the Storefront

BSS

In the BSS, enable or disable auto-renewal by selecting the corresponding option, which is located under the Shortcuts menu of each subscription and reflects the status of the subscription.

For more information, please see the page Managing Subscription Automatic Renewals

Changing the Subscription Licenses

You can increase & decrease the NCE licenses of a subscription. Please note that each seat increase has its own cancellation window of 7 days, regardless of the cancellation window of the original NCE subscription.
By proceeding to the page, you can find a step-by-step guide, on increasing the licenses.

Canceling NCE Subscriptions

For New Commerce Experience offers, partners can immediately cancel their subscription(s), from both the BSS and the Storefront, with a prorated refund within the first 7 days for any term (proration calculated based on hourly rate) and on renewal of the subscription.
Therefore, purchased NCE subscriptions may be returned within 24 hours of purchase time for a full refund, while partial returns are applicable for cancellations of up to 7 days (168 hours) since purchase or renewal time.

After the 7 day (168 hours) period, cancellation is no longer available. The partner will be billed for the entire term, even if the customer stops paying for or using the subscription (applicable to any billing plan).

When a cancellation is complete, the customer will immediately lose access to the service, the service can’t be restored, and the state of the subscription will be nonrecoverable.

Upon renewal of the subscription, partners will get another 7-day (168 hours) cancellation window to cancel their subscription for a prorated refund.

Calculation of Cancellation Timeframe

Microsoft set the cancellation timeframe of 7 days to be calculated based on the hourly rate. Our systems also calculate the 7 days period based on a hourly rate. This is because we are in full alignment with Microsoft’s hour rate calculation of the cancellation timeframe since the introduction of the latest that is applied to all product types.
Consequently, the NCE product type, has its cancellation refund policy enforced, and locked by default, to the hourly rate. For an example of how the refund calculation works on a canceled NCE service, please check the page.

Cancellation Requests Submitted After the Cancellation Timeframe

A cancelation for an NCE subscription is done by communicating with Microsoft’s API, and depending on the API return, the cancelation proceeds or not. By design, a cancelation request can be submitted even if it is outside of the cancelation window, but it will get refused by Microsoft’s API. As a result, two new records will appear in the subscription’s history section indicating that the cancellation request was canceled by Microsoft. For more information, please check the section.

Cancellation of NCE Subscriptions via BSS

To cancel an NCE subscription via BSS all you have to do is click on the Cancel button, located under the Shortcuts menu of the subscription, and proceed with the overall cancellation process as usual. You can also notice on the upper part of the NCE subscription a convenient informative ribbon indicating the date and time until the cancellation of the subscription is possible. This ribbon is displayed exactly as it appears on the Microsoft Partner Center (in the Partner Center timezone). When the cancellation is still available then the color of the ribbon is blue whereas if the cancellation is not available the color of the ribbon changes to orange, as is visible from the screenshot below.

Cancellation outside the 7-day window is not possible. Suppose a BSS user tries to cancel an NCE subscription or a number of NCE licenses from a subscription outside the 7-day window. In that case, our check mechanism will stop the cancellation action and will display the following error message:

The subscription remains as-is, while its synchronization status and subscription status remain the same.

Cancellation of NCE Subscriptions via Storefront

The Storefront user is able to cancel an NCE subscription either as a whole or partially. By selecting the I want to… button and choosing the Cancel the subscription option available on an NCE subscription, a new popup will appear, informing them of the number of seats they are about to cancel.

Since the Storefront user is able to cancel either the whole NCE subscription or just decrease seats, the seat number is available for edits but the effectiveness of the action is immediate and cannot be edited, currently.

Once the cancellation is successful, the following message is displayed:

Failure of Cancellation

In case the subscription cancellation does not go through, because the cancellation is no longer available (7 days have passed since subscription creation), the following message is being displayed on the upper right part of the page.

Right now, by default, the cancellation requests of NCE subscriptions get executed automatically. However, when the BSS user decides to change this on the NCE product type (from the BSS setup), the cancellation requests get created for the BSS user to accept. In this case, the BSS user can view the NCE subscriptions with pending cancellation requests from the Pending Subscription Cancellation Requests widget on the BSS dashboard.

Cancellation View in Storefront

The Storefront user has a view of when the full cancellation of their NCE subscription is due, via the view page of the NCE subscription, under the Cancel until: title. The same date and time appear on Microsoft Partner Center (in the time zone of the Storefront user).

Note that if the Cancel until (cancellation end date) has passed, the date and time appear in red.

Subscription History Logs On Cancellation Requests

When a cancellation request is sent to Microsoft for approval, there are two possible cases.

1. The cancellation request is accepted by Microsoft within the cancellation window, and as a result, the actual cancellation is completed.

2. The cancellation request is not accepted by Microsoft, meaning that it is outside the cancellation window, and as a result, the actual cancellation is canceled.

In both those cases mentioned above, the subscription History section, also known as the Notification & Updates section, found inside the subscription view page in BSS, logs both cases.

• In the first case, where the cancellation request is accepted by Microsoft, the History log will display a similar result as the one in the following screenshot.

  As a result, one new record will appear in the subscription’s History section indicating that Microsoft accepted the cancellation request which means that the cancellation is executed also in our systems.
  
  

• In the second case, where the cancellation request is rejected by Microsoft, the History log will display a similar result as the one in the following screenshot.

  As a result, two new records will appear in the subscription’s History section indicating that Microsoft canceled the cancellation request which means that the cancellation is neither executed in our systems nor in Microsoft.

Suspending NCE Subscriptions

Microsoft introduced for the NCE subscription a new suspension policy: Microsoft Partner can now suspend and then resume a new commerce subscription at any time without cancellation or termination;  Partner billing continues during the suspension.

We are fully aligned with Microsoft policy and a BSS user can suspend an NCE subscription and the action results in the subscription’s suspension on Partner Center as well. The service will continue to be billed from our system while the subscription is suspended.

Activate a Suspended Subscription

For our systems to be aligned with Microsoft, when a suspended NCE subscription gets activated again, the “Auto-Renew” option of the subscription turns off by default since Microsoft has the same implementation.

User Management (via Storefront Workspace)

The current version of the NCE integration does not support managing the user licenses from the user's management facility we have introduced in Storefront’s workspace section. Currently, if a customer has purchased NCE licenses, the setup button redirects him to the Microsoft admin portal. It has been planned to be supported in one of the subsequent versions of the NCE integration.

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