Microsoft NCE integration with Atria

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hi my name’s colin williams today i’m
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going to go through our plan changes to
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support the microsoft new commerce
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experience within atria
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quickly go through some of the
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challenges facing direct microsoft
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partners partner center is the only tool
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available for
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partners to use to transact
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microsoft licensing
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firstly there is no way to delegate the
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responsibility for licensing to your
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customers they need you to do this for
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them
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accuracy is a big issue with nce
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unnoticed mistakes will really hurt your
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business
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microsoft will charge regardless of
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human error
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subscriptions have terms associated with
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them
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of which you’re responsible
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and customers are unlikely to want to
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pay for your mistakes
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so we have to be really careful about
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this
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there’s complexities in the licensing
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which lead to mistakes there’s now over
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a thousand combinations of products many
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of which have similar names as an
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example there are nine products with e5
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in the name
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and i’m sure that
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for any reasonable person it’s pretty
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easy to make a mistake
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finally
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partner center is slow to use
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the process around partner center can
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really slow down customer support if
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you’ve got a separate team dealing with
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licensing it can make your time to
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actually make changes
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very very long for your customers
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licensing shouldn’t be a bottleneck to
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your productivity
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or your customers productivity
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so what are we going to do
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so our approach is to have a phased
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approach to feature delivery
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we will do small incremental releases of
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the software and our intention is to
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receive and respond to feedback quickly
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in the next iteration of the product
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we want to work with our csp partners to
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deliver a better solution that works for
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you
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and that improves on our existing
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microsoft online management features
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our first phase is focused on
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existing customer subscriptions and
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updating customer subscriptions
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this will include legacy and new
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commerce subscriptions
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you will be able to
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change subscription quantity
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on on both legacy and newcomer
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subscriptions
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this speech will allow t1 providers to
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enable customers to view and update
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their own subscriptions
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and it will allow a help desk to
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increase existing subscriptions
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phase one today is in pre-release
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testing as expected to be available on
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the 23rd of march
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this is a screenshot of the
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subscriptions page
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all subscriptions for the currently
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selected tenant are shown the sync
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subscriptions button will refresh
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current status full subscriptions from
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partner center
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this page is quick to load and it’s
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relatively quick to synchronize the
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subscriptions down
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as a service provider user you can
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switch between tenants in seconds
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and clicking on a row shows the edit
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subscription pop-up the pop-up fields
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will change depending on whether it’s a
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legacy or a new comma subscription as
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features are different depending on
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which subscription type you have
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the term cannot be changed the payment
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frequency cannot be changed auto renew
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can be enabled or disabled for newcomer
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subscriptions
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rightsize is a feature we will add which
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will allow subscriptions to be
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automatically reduced prior to renewal
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this will come in a later phase
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phase two will allow new subscriptions
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to be created through atria in order to
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do this we will add an nce catalog
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feature which will allow you to select
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which offers you want to be available
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for purchase by your customers
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of 1000 offerings you will likely use
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less than 30 so it’s really important
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feature to kind of remove the noise and
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the potential confusion
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the catalog will allow customers to
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locate the right offers they need based
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on their qualifications so for example
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educational government will receive
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the appropriate offers to them
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the ad subscription function will create
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the new subscription directly in partner
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center
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here’s a rough mock-up of the catalog
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view this will likely change with time
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but we will show
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but it will show similar information to
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the end users
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the idea is it will be clear and easy to
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use and it will be easy to subscribe
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the add new subscription pop-up will be
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similar to the edit subscription page
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that i showed earlier
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phase 3 will focus on billing
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many direct csps have substantial
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businesses which have mature financial
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and operational systems
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on charging for microsoft services can
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be challenging
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our goal is to provide a simple
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capability for retrieving and parsing
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microsoft invoice data
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and then tagging the subscription data
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to the appropriate customer within atria
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this will be a batch process run within
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atria its goal is to allow individual
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customers to be on charge for their
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subscriptions
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and for this data to be available
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through the patreon billing apis
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in addition we will work to prove this
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through our existing psa integrations
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phase four will refocus on changes to
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license assignment to users
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at present licenses are assigned by
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atria plans although this works well
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when adding new customers are important
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new users it means that every
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combination of possible plan feature and
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add-on is required
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this leads to lots of similar plans
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which are hard to maintain
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with nce we plan to simplify license
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assignment and allow direct assignment
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of licenses to use us this is also
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easier now that add-on structure has
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changed as there are now term
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commitments and price increases it’s
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going to be more important than ever to
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ensure that the subscriptions are
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minimized if a subscription is set to
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right size atria will shrink the
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subscription at renewal if there are any
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unused licenses available
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we will look to re-add auto increment
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where a default subscription will
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increase automatically if there are no
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spare licenses
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finally phase 5 will introduce an sdk to
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allow distributors to be integrated into
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atria this will mean that the delegated
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admin functions will operate via a
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distributor’s apa
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we expect to carry out an initial
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implementation of the distributor and
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then use this to provide guidance for
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subsequent integrations
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this is a bit further down the track
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we’ve quickly been through our plans for
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nce nothing here is set in stone we will
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refine our plan with our existing
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customers as we work through our
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iterations we really do welcome any
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feedback so please get in touch if you
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want to discuss further my details are
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here and you can also contact us at
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sales get atria.com