Microsoft SaaS - CONNECT 13.0 Release Notes

Introduction

This document describes the new features, enhancements, fixed issues and known limitations of Microsoft SaaS - CONNECT v13.0

New Features

Microsoft SaaS - CONNECT 13.0 introduced the following new features:

  • Order-Level Partner Attestation of Customer Licensing Compliance for NCE Windows 365 Hybrid benefit.

    In order to use the Windows 365 Hybrid Benefit, Microsoft requires for transacting partners to attest that the customer is already properly licensed with a qualifying Windows product, such as Windows 10/11 Pro.

    This is not a breaking change. However, Microsoft may use this Attestation data in any future Partner Compliance Audit.

  • The Customer AAD Tenant Business Profile company name and email address are now dynamically validated with Microsoft Commerce Platform’s Address Validation System (AVS). Dynamic Order Validation will check the following:

    • Customer AAD Tenant Billing Profile Company Name: Names with a single character or consisting of only special characters or with standalone abbreviations will not be allowed.

    • Customer AAD Tenant Billing Profile Email Address: Email addresses with an incorrect format, or those with the microsoft.com domain or with the same domain as the Partner’s email will not be allowed.


      If a wrong company name or email address is provided, transacting partners will be asked to provide them in the correct format.

Enhancements

  • Provisioning Reliability for CSP Microsoft 365: Presently, there can sometimes be an issue when a transacting partner attempts a Connect Purchase Order for a CSP Microsoft 365 Base Offer and one or more Addon Offers. The Connect Processor correctly requests the Base Offer first, but may not allow sufficient time for Microsoft to actually provision before trying the Addon(s). This can lead to an overall Order Failure.

    With this enhancement, the Connect Processor will now attempt the order of the Addons up to four times before transitioning to an Order Failure State. This should allow more time (typically about 20 minutes) for Microsoft to provision the Base offer (for which Microsoft internally has a 15-minute Service Level Objective (SLO)).

    This should prevent most failures in Addon provisioning requests, as 92% of Sales Orders for CSP Microsoft 365 complete within the 15-minute Microsoft-internal SLO.

    CloudBlue will monitor the change in issue intensity before and after the change, and take further changes under advisement.

    Please also note that, as the final day to commit a CSP Microsoft 365 Sales Order is 28-February-2022, this use case can only present for a short time longer in any event.

  • NCE Microsoft 365 Base-Attach Enforcement: Microsoft is presently supporting NCE Microsoft 365 as a “Technical Availability” with “General Availability” to follow in January 2022.

    During the Technical Availability period, Microsoft is unable to check the condition where a qualifying Base Offer is not present for a Customer AAD Tenant when a dependent Attach Offer is being ordered. Microsoft will introduce this capability for the “General Availability”.

    Meanwhile, with this enhancement, CloudBlue has attempted an in-house partial solution to Base-Attach Enforcement for Single Partner of Record Sales Orders in the present Shopping Cart journey. If when attempting to provision an Attach Offer, an error is returned by Microsoft, the request for Attach Offer will be skipped, assuming that the current Shopping Cart also has a request for the qualifying Base Offer. The Connect Processor will wait until the Base item is provisioned to attempt the Attach Offer provisioning.

  • Subscription Support Billing Contact: During calendar 2021, Microsoft introduced new compliance requirements and enhancements to Partner registration and use of PLA MPNID.

    This has had a consequential impact to transacting Partners in multi-country Microsoft Authorized Regions (i.e. Europe, Asia, Latin America, Caribbean etc.) where a single commercial Partner operating in multiple countries may have several Partner Local Authorization (PLA) MPNIDs. There is no consequential impact to Partners in single-country Microsoft Authorized Regions (i.e. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United States etc.).

    Partners in multi-country Microsoft Authorized Regions now have the choice as to which MPNID to use for Partner of Record purposes. This enhancement changes the way Partner’s Support Contact Information is retrieved from the Partner AAD Tenant and applied to the newly provisioned Active Subscription. The Connect Processor now explicitly uses the indicated PLA MPNID to retrieve the Support Contact Information of the associated Partner Center Dashboard AAD.

  • Change Orders to Connect End of Sale Offers: Changes have been implemented to allow initial Change Orders against active subscriptions that Microsoft has marked “End of Life” and that CloudBlue Connect has marked as “End of Sale”.

    This feature was introduced to support CloudBlue Partners that are onboarding legacy business provisioned originally by third-party systems that included Microsoft EOL Offers. It should not have any bearing on Connect assets that were originally provisioned by Connect, or any transitioned business for non-EOL Offers.

Fixed Issues

  • CSP Microsoft 365 Provisioning Reliability: Presently, there is an occasional issue where a Connect Purchase Request is Failed when a post-provisioning activity to set the Partner Support Contact Information fails because it was tried too early. In this case, the subscription may subsequently provision successfully at Microsoft, but the overall order will have already been marked as Failed.

    With this enhancement, the Connect Processor will not attempt to set the Partner Support Contact Information until the Microsoft Subscription is verified as Active.

    Note: Microsoft does not yet have the ability to set Partner Support Contact Information for NCE Microsoft 365 subscriptions. This feature is anticipated for calendar 2022 and CloudBlue will adopt.

  • The Connect Processor has been modified to be able to handle a new response from Microsoft API to check the status of a transition.

  • Transitions can now be identified by origin and target offerId rather than by catalogItemIds in order to avoid problems related to availabilities.

  • Provisioning Reliability from Connect Item vs Microsoft Offer Naming Disparity: In the catalog of Connect Items (generated by CloudBlue Product Catalog Automation Tools (PCAT), offers for Qualified Education Customers are configured as “Academic” whereas Microsoft Commerce Platform uses “Education”. This results in a “No SKU Availability” issue because the system is unable to match the correct offer.

    This issue presented because Microsoft itself uses “Academic” and “Education” in separate contexts of its documentation and specifications.

    With this fix, the Connect Processor has been modified to use “Education” instead of “Academic” regardless of the operating context.

  • Provisioning Reliability from NCE Microsoft 365 Offer Qualifications: The Connect Processor has been modified to use the proper TargetSegment (education, nonprofit, commercial) to minimize errors when getting SKU Availabilities.

  • Provisioning Reliability from Tiers Config: Issues have been fixed to prevent Tier Config requests from remaining in Pending Status due to issues with the Connect Activation Template.

    Note: CloudBlue is presently undertaking to re-evaluate the content of all Activation Templates for Microsoft SaaS Products. Please expect announcements in the near future. Your feedback is always appreciated.

  • Active Subscription Migration Reliability: The Connect Processor’s jobs for migration activities can now discard suspended and deleted subscriptions to focus on active subscriptions, thereby solving a data validation issue in a Partner migration process.

Known Limitations

  • NCE Microsoft 365 to Non-Qualified Commercial Customers: Changing the NCE order billing cycle is not supported.

  • NCE Microsoft 365 to Non-Qualified Commercial Customers: Downsizing or changing the billing cycle in upgrades is not supported.

  • All Microsoft User-Based Products: End-User Management is not supported.

  • Special characters are not saved correctly in Connect.

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