Enabling the Microsoft New Commerce Experience
By navigating to BSS Setup > Administration > System Options > Applications Setup > Microsoft Cloud Services and clicking on the Settings button, you are redirected inside the Microsoft Cloud Services Service Manager where you can choose your preferred instance. Inside each Microsoft instance, a new section appears, named New Commerce Experience NCE. This new section is where the BSS user can enable the option to update his Microsoft catalog with the NCE products via the Get Services Definition process.
Before enabling the Enable New Commerce checkbox, the New Commerce Experience (NCE) section requires that you first specify the market country under the NCE Market Country field by choosing one of the enabled countries of your Organization from the respective drop-down button.
After enabling the New Commerce checkbox and choosing the NCE Market Country, please click the Save button, for the changes to take effect.
Microsoft New Commerce Experience Product Type
Once the New Commerce is enabled for a specific country, upon clicking on the Get Services Definition button, the process triggers the creation of the new product type named Microsoft Online Services (New Commerce).
Therefore, as the update process progresses, the NCE services will appear on the list of services to be created/updated on the following confirmation pop-up window.
All 284 new products of this Microsoft Online Services (New Commerce) product type are handled as subscriptions and belong to the MS Cloud Services group. The name of the group is the name that the BSS administrator specified during the setup of the cloud app.
Furthermore, the product type that is created during the Get Services Definition process for the New Commerce Experience products is the Microsoft Online Services (New Commerce) and its product properties are the following.
MS Service Plan: This property is the MS Service Plan id for each NCE product which is a unique ID that derives from the combination of the ProductID and the SKUID of that NCE product.
Subscription Type: This property is used to distinguish between base subscriptions and add-ons.
Product Family: This property specifies the group of products, as defined by Microsoft, and contains one of the following values:
Microsoft 365
Dynamics 365
Power Platform
Windows 365
Each NCE product is grouped under the respective group that it belongs to in order to be more easily found and ordered.
Microsoft New Commerce Experience Products
The Get Services Definition process imports/updates automatically in your BSS the New Commerce Experience products that you will be eligible to resell, at a later date.
NCE products are active when they are created, even without an assigned price, and with only the organization’s default currency enabled. Any subsequent call of the Get Services Definition process updates all NCE products and creates new products that have become available since the last update.
Identifying NCE Products
The title/name of each New Commerce Experience product contains one of the following prefixes (D365/M365/POWERPLATFORM/W365) depending on the product family it belongs to, and the (New Commerce) suffix to identify them as New Commerce Experience products.
Add-ons & Prerequisite Products
The NCE add-ons may appear as standalone, and when purchased, they create subscriptions on their own. However, the Microsoft tenant has to have an existing base subscription and that base subscription must function as the add-ons prerequisite product, in order to proceed with the purchase of the add-on.
Moreover, when purchasing one of these base NCE products, no add-on is suggested or displayed in the user interface (BSS and Storefront), as you may have been accustomed to. Rather, the add-ons become visible, suggestible, and available after a base NCE product has been purchased and a synchronized and active subscription of that product exists.
Lastly, once a base product subscription exists and then an add-on is purchased, that is apparently connected to this base product, their subscriptions remain two separate subscriptions, and not a combination of the two into one as you may have been accustomed to.
For all the abovementioned reasons, add-ons will be and look exactly like the products. For this reason, a custom field is added, so that the BSS user can know whether an NCE product is an actual product or an add-on.
Prices for NCE Products & Add-ons
As we have previously mentioned, the "Get Services definition" process activates all the New Commerce Experience products and add-ons, based on your organization's default currency, and sets both purchase and sell prices to zero. For assigning the prices to the products, you should run the New Commerce Experience Pricing Tool that is analyzed under the Updating New Commerce Experience Product Prices page.
Products Description
Our system will try to bring the descriptions of all the New Commerce Experience 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 counties, 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 New Commerce Experience products follows the same rules that apply to Microsoft Office 365 plans. Each month that you are running the "Get Services Definition" process, the list of available New Commerce Experience products is updated and for each one, the "catalog status" is updated.