In this month’s edition of Partner Center Technical Corner, we’re covering the updates that will help you and your organization be more efficient, informed, and secure. It begins with a spotlight on the power of AI, then covers calls to action and before diving into the latest releases. As always, at the end of the blog you’ll find the most up-to-date technical roadmap and essential Partner Center resources.
Spotlight: Put the power of AI to work
March began with the announcement of Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 expanding availability to education customers, as well as the general availability of new offerings, Microsoft Copilot for Sales, and Microsoft Copilot for Services—which provide new ways for customers and partners to embrace AI to enhance how they work and achieve their goals. We continued the momentum mid-month by announcing the general availability of Microsoft Copilot for Security on all commerce channels, including CSP, on April 1, 2024.
Partners have a substantial opportunity to help every customer, regardless of their size, become an AI-powered organization with these Copilot offers. All partners can register for the Copilot for Microsoft 365 Sales & Technical Bootcamp for CSPs and read more in our blog about specific opportunities for education partners with Copilot for M365. Start defining your strategy and operationalizing your sales engine!
Calls to action
Securing the channel and enforcing multifactor authentication (MFA): Microsoft is committed to enhancing security for all our partners and customers and helping them adopt the Zero Trust Maturity Model. To achieve this goal, we’ll continue to introduce new tools and policies to secure your tenant that will enable partners to monitor their environment, provide visibility/telemetry into environment threats, and manage identities with multifactor authentication enforcement.
Beginning in February 2024, Microsoft started enabling security defaults for existing CSP tenants who have not yet enabled security defaults or conditional access. Security defaults are a set of recommended security settings for Microsoft Entra tenants that protect against common identity-related attacks, such as password spray and phishing. After security defaults are enabled, all users in the organization will have 14 days to register for multifactor authentication. After 14 days have passed, the user cannot sign in until MFA registration is completed. A user’s 14-day period begins after their first successful interactive sign-in after enabling security defaults.
By enabling security defaults, you will be adopting security best practices and increasing your customers’ confidence. We particularly recommend that you register for MFA as soon as possible. For CSP partners with Microsoft Enterprise ID P1 or P2 licenses, you can use Conditional Access policies to customize your access policies.
Partners can mitigate their MFA compliance risks by using the new customer MFA reporting feature in Partner Center’s Insights workspace for a comprehensive overview of your customers’ MFA status and compliance. Then, proactively use this data to identify and address gaps or risks in your customers’ security postures. We strongly advise you to activate security defaults or Conditional Access policies as well as enforce MFA for all your customers’ users.
In April, we’re launching the new Security Workspace in Partner Center, where partners can assess their security risks and take the necessary steps to improve their security posture.
New commerce CSP launches Public Sector offers and partner transfers: Starting in March 2024, we are excited to kick off the phased introduction of public sector offers (including academic, GCC, and NFP/charity) on the new commerce experience. We encourage you to work with your customers on a plan to move their subscriptions to new commerce starting now, to give yourself time to set the subscription terms that work best for your customers. Learn more about the CSP new commerce public sector launch.
Additionally, Microsoft is preparing a new capability which enables partners to transfer new commerce license-based product subscriptions to other partners. This capability has been available for Azure plan transfers for some time and soon you will also be able to transfer new commerce license-based subscriptions in the same way. Learn more about partner-to-partner transfer capability.
Just released
Billing improvements—new commerce asynchronous APIs on MS Graph: We are excited to announce the general availability of our new commerce asynchronous billing APIs for daily rated usage data on MS Graph. These APIs allow you to retrieve billed and unbilled usage data for new commerce Azure subscriptions or Azure plans via Azure blobs. They offer:
- More than 85% performance improvement, allowing you to retrieve data more quickly
- Compressed payload, reducing the size of data
- Adjustable response to allow you to select the attributes to include
- Data that is split into segments based on number of records for easy access
Partners can upgrade to the new V2 APIs. Non-V2 APIs are on a retirement plan. Learn more about retirement plans.
The new commerce invoice reconciliation API v2 on MS Graph has similar benefits. This API now has a new attribute named “ProductCategory” that enriches the reconciliation data, enabling partner billing by product category, supporting informed decisions on investments based on product category, and improving reconciliation by enabling tracking of product category. The invoice reconciliation API v2 also provides the ability for partners to view their customer spend and budget by product category.
Rewarding partner performance: High-Water Mark (HWM) incentives for Modern Work & Security (MW&S) Usage and BizApps Presales Advisor engagements are now available. HWM is a model that tracks the highest value of measured units—Monthly Active Users for MW&S Usage and Net Paid Seat Growth for BizApps Presales—by tenant/workload. This model pays eligible partners associated with the customer tenant/workload combination for the incremental units added above the set HWM level. By measuring HWM performance at the customer tenant level and tracking HWM over time, we ensure payment accuracy, and the fixed rate card model provides earnings transparency and predictability. Learn more in the incentives guide.
Surface Partners can now claim co-op and begin earning through Microsoft’s latest update in Partner Center, which helps effectively reconcile earnings for growth-based levers. Earning and accrual has also been made simpler through growth-based automation, and both partners and 3rd party sellers can gain immediate, automated insight into incentives and money gained.
For engagements with maxcap, partners can now understand how much more can be earned before the max cap limits come into play. This can be done by leveraging the MaxCapBalance report. This report is applicable to engagements with max cap and includes HWM, new commerce, modern work usage, Azure, and devices engagements. Check for this report on the reports page of Earnings workspace.
Membership: Three new distinct benefits packages—Partner Launch, Partner Success Core, and Partner Success Expanded Benefits—are tailored to partners at different growth stages. These packages complement existing Solutions Partner and ISV Success benefits. Boost your business with purpose-built support designed to propel you to the next level. Additionally, enjoy a seamless, unified buying process across Azure, Office, and Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program membership offers by linking your Partner Center accounts to the new commerce platform.
Insights: A new version (v1.1) of programmatic access to Insights reports is now available! This update gives partners greater flexibility to schedule reports at specific intervals. Reporting covers Commercial Marketplace and CPP insights reports. Additionally, Surface insights reporting has revised tiering criteria that now only considers new assessments as the old assessments (PC Level 1, 2, 3 and Zero Touch Deployment Training) retire. This results in accurate tier calculation for partners.
Partner Center Technical Roadmap and resources