Date:
Installation: You can upgrade to 3.26.0 using the interworks.cloud installer
Microsoft Software Subscriptions - Availability of Ordering Process via BSS
In this release we completed the ordering process for the Microsoft Subscriptions from the BSS.
Your account managers can now order Microsoft subscriptions on behalf of their customers from BSS.
They can see the details of the Software subscriptions they orders from the Assets module.
What's next?
The Azure Reservation integration will be completed in the next releases where we will deliver the following:
Software subscriptions availability for tenant resellers and country tenants. Support of ordering, provisioning and back-ordering for the Software subscriptions products from your tenants.
Cancelation of Software subscription assets.
For more details, please check Ordering Microsoft Software Licenses from BSS
Azure Budget Alerts (available for Storefront v4)
The budget alerts can be used by your resellers and direct customers to plan service cost. With budgets they can:
View If the current consumption of their Azure subscription is reaching close to the cost budget.
Define usage thresholds and compare their estimated usages with current usages
Receive alerts. Alerts are notifications that are sent when a crossover of the current budget takes place
A budget alert is defined per Azure subscription and it can be setup only by your customers. You can only view the alerts defined by your customer but you cannot define your own.
What's next?
In the next release, the budget alert will be available to Storefront v3 also.
For more details, please check Setting Azure Budget Alerts
Integration with PayU Payment Gateway
From this release, intetworks.cloud platform supports credit card payments using the PayU Payment Gateway.
- Once PayU has been configured in your BSS, a new step will be displayed during checkout where the customer will be asked to enter his credit card details in an inline form managed by PayU.
- All invoices will be charged automatically using the token we have collected from PayU for the credit card the customer entered
For more details, please check PayU
Activation of Price Protection for Existing Office 365 Subscriptions
In this release we introduced the facility to add under price protection your existing subscriptions. You can perform a batch activation by selecting the subscriptions you want under price protection by running a search in your list of your subscriptions. The activation can be applied only to subscriptions that are not under price protection. If you select a subscription that is under protection, you will receive an error at the end of the process.
The price protection end date will be calculated automatically by our system using the "Effective Date" the subscription has in Microsoft partner center. The protected cost and sell prices will be calculated using subscription pricing options.
For more details, please check Activating the Price Protection for a Subscription
Interworks .cloud External Authentication Framework
We implemented a framework for our platform to integrate with external authentication services, providing registration/login capabilities of BSS users authenticated through external IdP's (Identity Providers).
Such services can be used to identify users maintained in external user stores and map them to BSS users providing access to the interworks.cloud platform when logged-in (authenticated) from these external sources.
Support for SAML 2.0 Protocol
The first protocol that we implemented in SAML 2.0. It is an XML-based open standard data format for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties that uses security tokens containing assertions to pass information about a user between a SAML authority (HPE identity provider) and a SAML consumer (interworks.cloud BSS).
If your company maintains a SAML 2.0-based Identity Provider solution for issuing identification information, you can benefit from BSS integration with the protocol and provide your users a single sign-on experience to BSS.
Invoice Item Cost
In this release we introduced two new fields for the invoice items for displaying the prorated cost of the invoice item (for the billed period). It is the "unit cost" that is the cost per unit (e.g the cost for 1 license) and the "total cost" that is the unit cost multiplied with the invoice item quantity. The cost fields are calculated with the following way:
- For price protected subscriptions, the unit cost will be the price protected cost of the related subscription.
- For non protected subscriptions, the unit cost will be derived from product's current cost
- For azure resources, the unit cost is the charges we are getting from Microsoft Billing API
- For the one off products, it is the unit cost that has the related order item.
In the details of an invoice, we now display the total cost of the invoice broken per billing type (e.g monthly, annually, one off etc.)
These two new fields are available in our reporting engine for creating reports that include the cost information. These fields are also available via API from the methods that return data for the invoice items.
Storefront v4 - Availability of Support Section
From this release the Support section is fully functional in Storefront v4. Your customer can use it for submitting tickets and monitoring their progress.
New API Methods
In this release we implemented a new set of API methods for the Assets and Products module. The following methods are available in 3.0 version.
| API Method | Description |
|---|---|
| Asset API | |
| GET /api/assets | Returns all available assets (e.g Reserved Instances, Software Licenses and Microsoft ESD licenses) |
| GET /api/assets/{assetId} | Returns the basic asset information for a given asset ID. |
| GET /api/assets/{assetId}/characteristics | Returns all characteristics for a given asset ID. For a Reservation instance for example, it returns the properties explained here |
| GET /api/assets/{assetId}/customfields | It returns the custom fields for the asset record. For the Azure Reservations, it returns the customer fields described here |
| Product Catalogue API | |
| GET /api/products | It returns all the products |
| GET /api/products/{productId} | Get the basic info of a product for a given product ID. |
| GET api/products/{productId}/customfields | Get product's custom fields for a given product ID. |
| Invoice API (update) | |
| GET Invoice Items | For invoice items that are for Reserved Instances or Software licenses we return data about the related Asset record. Then you can call the Asset API for getting more details. |
Check API v3.0 for more details.
Stripe Payment Gateway Enhancements
In this release we included the following enhancements for Stripe Gateway:
- Enabling Email Receipts from Stripe. With each transaction we pass to Stripe the email of the logged in user for Stripe to send the payment receipt.
- Localization of Stripe SEPA Form. You can now localize the SEPA forom using our Language Pack Tool. Check Localization of SEPA form for more details.
Azure Reservations - SQL Data Warehouse Offers
From this release we support the new reservation type "SQL Data Warehouse". The ordering and provisioning process is similar with the reset reservation types.
For more details, please check Selecting the Reservation Type.
Automatic Renew of Microsoft Authentication Token
The process you are running for giving your consent to our platform, it generates an authentication token that expires in 90 days. In this release we introduced a mechanism that renews automatically this token once per week. With this enhancement you will no longer need to re-run every 90 days the authentication process.