New Commerce Experience Portal for Direct CSPs – Is Microsoft NCE giving you headaches?

Microsoft have pushed on this year with the New Commerce Experience (NCE) rollout for user-based licenses. If you are struggling with daily use of Microsoft Partner Center or stalled integration projects for your in-house portal, you are certain to not be alone.

New Commerce Experience will impact pre-existing integrations, changes are large and complex to understand, due to the security requirements of the PartnerCenter API’s and lack of documentation. It’s also an expensive exercise to build portal functionality for subscription management and billing.

There are third party solutions around which help with this problem, the downside is that most are billing centered and hence require a re-platforming of your entire billing system, or the undesirable situation of having multiple CRM/Billing systems. Which is perhaps a larger integration problem.

Introducing Atria for Microsoft NCE Subscription Management (Video), Pain relief for Microsoft Partners!

We believe we have a great solution for direct Microsoft partners that will help relieve many of your New Commerce Experience pains.

Some of the key features for the different roles in your business.

Helpdesk

Subscription Management for your Helpdesk

Why? Provide better service to your customers, improve your service desk productivity.

Give your helpdesk the ability to service/close customer issues immediately and without needing to escalate to another team with access rights to Partner Center.

• Empower helpdesk to update existing subscriptions, while ensuring they cannot pick the wrong product type. Avoid accidental purchases of $000s of the wrong SKU for the wrong customer.
• Remove service desk access to Partner Center
• Swap between tenants and view subscriptions in seconds – without waiting for Partner Center.
• Audit changes, who added the license and when.
• View New Commerce Experience Subscriptions alongside legacy subscriptions.

If you want, you can optionally grant service desk engineers (or selectively) the ability to create new subscriptions for customers from a pre-configured set of products. (Note that Atria Subscription management only allows creation of New Commerce Experience type subscriptions)

Customers

Self-Service Subscription Management for your customers

Why? Remove unnecessary work from service desk, improving customer experience.

Capable customer, or just transacting licenses? Let your customers manage licenses themselves – zero touch or involvement from your service desk.

With New Commerce Experience, Subscriptions now carry commitments – by empowering customers to make their own changes, they are responsible for their own actions as well as their mistakes. Remove communication mistakes which cost your business real money and damage customer relationships.

• Retrieve and show all subscriptions within their tenant.
• Optionally, provide a curated set of products from the Microsoft catalog from which new subscriptions can be created.
• Audit customers changes and record who created or updated subscriptions.

Reports

Why? Know what you have already before buying more Microsoft licenses.

Simple reports are updated daily in the background, retrieving all licenses within the tenant regardless of where they were sourced. So, whether it’s licenses from another partner or licenses purchased directly from Microsoft – you can get visibility of them all without having to delve into multiple admin portals.

This report is available for the customer and provides a view across customers which can be exported to CSV.

User Management

Want to go beyond Subscription administration and self-service in your automation journey? Atria can also let your support desk and customers provision users in Active Directory and Azure Active Directory, as well as assign Microsoft Licenses and control desktop access.

Multi-Partner Center Capable

Atria supports multiple Partner Center Connections – if you operate across regions, Atria can manage your tenants and subscriptions seamlessly across Partner Centers with complete transparency to your service desk.

Channel Enablement or Franchise Operations?

Work through a channel? Need your partners to provision Microsoft New Commerce Subscriptions on behalf of their customers?

Atria has a hierarchical system that allows you to delegate responsibility for sub-customers to a reseller, or if you are providing IT services to a Franchise operation, you can delegate administration to the franchisor who can then delegate a subset of responsibilities to Franchisees.

We’ve got your back

Our team have worked with Microsoft and Microsoft technologies for 20+ years, we have spent our careers working with, in and around Microsoft Managed Service Providers, if you have a PartnerCenter problem, and if no one from Microsoft can help, and now that you have found us, maybe you should call the Atria team.

Worst case, use us as a shoulder to cry on, particularly if you have the New Commerce Experience blues.

Read more on M365 management with Atria.