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Starting January 2024, Microsoft will implement two major initiatives geared towards the retirement of the CSP legacy commerce platform. Starting from November 2023, public sector (academic, government community cloud [GCC], not-for-profit [NFP]/charity) offers will be available in new commerce for both new and renewing customers. Starting from January 2024, Microsoft will begin automatic migration of all renewing commercial and public sector customers to new commerce.
All legacy subscriptions that Microsoft migrates to new commerce will be set to an annual term while maintaining the original billing plan and the same number of seats as they previously held in legacy. The migration will occur on the date of subscription renewal, starting with all subscriptions renewed in January 2024.
After the migration, partners will have seven days window to modify the subscription term and/or quantity or cancel the subscription, if necessary.
For information on which CSP legacy offers are eligible for migration to the new commerce, partners can refer to the Partner Center Pricing workspace. Currently, only legacy commercial offers are listed. The public sector offers are scheduled to be added in November 2023.
A call to action
We recommend that you manage subscription migration for your customers to decide which offer, term, and billing frequency is the best fit in each case. Given that NCE subscriptions have a set of restrictions to change the quantity, billing term, or billing frequency and there is a price difference between different commitment periods, partner expertise is necessary to ensure the correct setup for the customer. In cases where the partner has a fluctuating or seasonal need for licenses, we recommend evaluating purchasing annual commitment for # of licenses that remain constant while for the quantity that fluctuates use in parallel monthly commitment subscription. And in this case, if the customer prefers a monthly commitment subscription instead of an annual one, you should migrate them before the legacy subscriptions reach their end of the term in 2024.
Next step for partners
- Check the subscription renewal date of your customers that are using legacy offers. In the AppXite platform, for this purpose, you can use Subscription Report.
- Review the Microsoft legacy offer matrix to confirm that your customer subscriptions are available for migration or, if you are using the AppXite platform, you can utilize the NCE Migration Report to conveniently see which subscriptions are eligible for migration, which new subscriptions they will be converted to, and which promotions apply.
- Partners can already start migrating subscriptions by referencing the Migrate subscriptions to the new commerce page and following the outlined steps in the Partner Center. Learn how to use the batch migration (BAM) tool. In the AppXite Platform, migration from legacy to NCE can be done easily by going to the list of your subscriptions, suspending the legacy subscription, and creating a new subscription for matching NCE products.
- Microsoft will organize technical training sessions and CSP Spotlight online webinars in October, November, and December to assist partners with the migration effort. These learning sessions will offer partners a comprehensive understanding of the migration process. An update featuring the schedule of migration-focused events will be available in September 2023.
- Learn how to earn partner incentives in the Microsoft Commerce Incentives program. Download the Partner Incentives Guide, and sign in to the Partner Center Incentives page to enroll in the program.
NB! Partners will not receive any Microsoft CSP incentives from Microsoft for legacy CSP subscriptions from 1 Jan 2023. Partners will not be able to create new legacy CSP subscriptions for commercial customers. New legacy CSP subscriptions can only be created for NFP and Education customers.
How AppXite Platform support NCE migration
AppXite provides the best purchasing and subscription management experience for our partners by continuously launching every single NCE offer as soon as it becomes generally available from Microsoft. In the AppXite platform, highly automated workflows and a set of tools support partners migrating customers from legacy to the new commerce offers in CSP smoothly:
- NCE Migration Report helps to migrate legacy subscriptions of their customers to NCE. The report identifies which subscriptions are eligible for migration, which new subscriptions they will be converted to, and which promotions apply. Thus, allowing account managers to transition their own customers without having to request access to Partner Center and digging through the list of migratable and non-migratable subscriptions.
- NCE Price List Report is a report to review price configuration by offer and customer for NCE offers to track the billing data over time.
