Activating Microsoft Software Subscriptions
- Panagiotis Papanastasiou
- Oleg Melnykov (Deactivated)
In the interworks.cloud platform, since the introduction of the New Microsoft Software Subscriptions, our customers will be able to order Software Subscriptions in the form of subscription-based products instead of the legacy Software Subscriptions (which were in the form of Assets).
In simple terms, the New Microsoft Software Subscriptions is an accommodation structure for multiple products to exist under one subscription for order and billing simplification reasons. For that purpose, the New Microsoft Software Subscriptions are defined in our BSS platform as subscription-based products with recuring-based billing. Therefore, the former product type of software subscriptions will continue to exist, but in a different form, creating subscriptions and not assets anymore.
The existing legacy Software Subscription products and assets will be automatically migrated by our systems into the new form of Software Subscriptions, only if their Provisioning Status & Asset Status is one of the following:
Provisioning Status | Asset Status |
|---|---|
Synchronized | Active |
Synchronized | Pending for cancellation |
Synchronized | Inactive |
Failed | Active (with external ID) |
Failed | Pending for cancellation (with external ID) |
The New Microsoft Software Subscriptions 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 Software subscriptions in your BSS. This process will create in your BSS the Microsoft Software subscription products and prices with which you can resell.
We fully support all the pricing rules introduced by Microsoft for the Software Subscriptions:
Automatic Upload of Software Subscription Products Prices: The existing integration of Software Subscriptions now supports the automatic retrieval and assignment of prices to Software Subscription products without requiring manual price import.
Prices are calculated automatically based on the end customer’s country and currency: Software Subscription 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.
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 to support those currencies while reselling Software Subscription products.
Define the Currencies for your Software Subscriptions
Before running the Get Services Definition action for updating your system with the Software Subscription 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 implementing the Perpetual License and the Software Subscriptions. You can select to activate certain currencies per instance (from the already enabled Organization currencies), based on which the Software Subscription products of that instance will be created and receive their cost and sell prices automatically.
For example, in the following screenshot, the Software Subscription 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 Software Subscriptions Product Type
This product type has just one property called "Software Subscription SKU" which contains a list of all the available Software subscription plans.
The software subscription products are subscription-based products, meaning that they will be handled as subscriptions in our system.
The "Software Subscription SKU" property is a drop-down list where the value is SKU's title, and the code is the combination ProductID:SKUID as defined in Microsoft API for each Software subscription plan.
Therefore, each unique ProductID:SKUID combination corresponds to a different Software Subscription Product (SKU).
If a BSS user wishes to create a child product type of the Basic Software Subscription, then all the settings of the Basic are inherited to the child product type.
Watch the video on software subscription product types below:
Microsoft Software Subscription Products
The Get Services Definition process imports/updates automatically in your BSS the Software subscriptions that you are eligible to resell, and the prices of those products are automatically assigned to them by default.
The products that will be returned will be the superset of the Software subscription products that are available in the countries you defined in the Microsoft Service Manager settings.
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 price lists of the countries.
For the unsupported currencies, we are using the exchange rate defined for each unsupported currency in the Software Subscriptions 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, Software Subscription 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 Software subscriptions products to the catalog language you defined in Microsoft settings, depending on whether Microsoft supports naming localization for the language you defined. If the language you 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 these languages. The rest will be in English.
Maintenance Process
The maintenance of the Software subscription products and prices is very simple. Each month you run the Get Services Definition action, the list of available Software subscription plans is updated along with the latest prices, and for each plan, the "catalog status" is updated. Check Managing the Updated Products for more details.
Software Subscriptions Custom Fields
When your reseller or customer will purchase a Software subscription product, our platform will create an order record for keeping the details of the purchase. For this subscription, we keep as information the Microsoft's Order ID, Order ID Alias, Software ID, and Software Expiration date. To keep these four values, the Get Services Definition action will automatically create four custom fields that will be used only for Software subscriptions. The definition of these fields can be found in BSS > Setup > Billing > Subscriptions > Custom Fields.
Software Subscriptions Unit
For the Software subscriptions purchases, we are going to use the units called Annual, and Triennial. These units belong to the "Recurring Charge" unit group, and they will be used for defining the unit of the invoice items that are for the Software subscriptions.