Work 365 Provisioning Best Practices

This article reviews the best practices of provisioning new client tenants and subscriptions from Work 365. 

 

Provider Accounts

When tenants are synced from the provider into Work 365, the system will attempt to automatically map the Customer tenant to a CRM Account. This mapping is called Provider account. In some cases the system may not be able to find a match. For more information on Provider Account refer to this article: Work 365 Provider Accounts
 

NOTE: When a provider account is not mapped to a CRM account record, it can cause a number of data related issues all of which can impact billing and provisioning.

The following are example data issues which can occur in this scenario

1. Subscriptions would sync to Work 365 without a Customer or Billing contract selected. This would prevent the subscription from being invoiced, and would require updating.
   1. As a side affect of this, the license change log which is created on the subscription would also not have the customer populated, and this too would need to be updated or the subscription would not be invoiced.
2. Provisioning new subscriptions for the customer would fail as there is no connection between the Provider Account with the CRM Account, billing contract, and subscription records.
3. Provisioning license changes on existing subscriptions would fail as there is no connection between the Provider Account with the CRM Account, billing contract, and subscription records.

To prevent this from occurring whenever there are new prospects which require a new tenant to be provisioned with Microsoft, it is recommended to complete the client onboarding process in Work 365 as this will automatically map the provider account record (tenant in Work 365) to the CRM account record.

TIP: It is best that whenever you sign up a new tenant or customer you verify that the Provider account is mapped correctly.

There is a Work 365 email template that serves this purpose called “Notification for new Provider Account”. Update the “To” field with an internal email alias to begin receiving notifications of when these provider accounts are synced to Work 365. 

Provisioning New Subscriptions:

Applies to both License and Usage Based(Azure Subscriptions)

When provisioning new Subscriptions for a customer it is best practice to provision from within Work 365 using the products in the your Product Catalog.  This ensures that

- You associate the Subscription to the correct Billing Contract

- You can confirm Pricing based on the standard pricing in your catalog

- You can define any bundling relationships

- You can verify through the License Change Log status that the Subscription has been successfully provisioned

- Confirm the behavior modification settings for the customer self-service Portal in the Advanced tab

- For Azure Subscriptions Confirm the default Mark up percentage

Note: In some instances you may need to provision the subscription directly in Partner Center. It is important to return to Work 365 and perform the Sync Subscriptions Operation on the Billing Contract that you intend to Sync the Subscription with. 

Perform the same checks listed above once the Subscription is correctly synced into the Contract.

 

Making Changes to existing Subscription Quantities

Perform Subscription Quantity Changes from within Work 365. This best practice will :

- Create an audit history of who made the change

- Confirm that the quantity change will be tracked correctly for billing purposes

- You can set the correct effective date for the change using the effective date strategy on the subscription

 

Considerations when subscription provisioning is not verified:

1. Subscription Sync:
   1. In the license change log(LCL)  of a subscription the order details to audit license changes that are tracked. In addition, the Work 365 self-service portal tracks the email ID of the end users making the license changes which provides rich audit history on the subscription. On the other hand, when items are provisioned in the automatic provider portal directly and synced to Work 365, this audit history is not captured.
2. Pricing will not be correct on the Subscription
   1. When the subscription syncs from the provider it would pull the default pricing from the product catalog price list as the system does not know what the agreed price was with the customer. If this is not updated it’s likely this price is used in the invoice calculation.
3. Loss of traceability on who made the change.
   1. when the sub is synced automatically to Work 365 the effective date of the license change log record is the day after when it was provisioned because the effective date reflects when it is synced from the provider. This can impact revenue because the invoice will calculate proration based on the effective date of the license change log record.
4. Bundling and service relationships may break
   1. If a subscription is part of a bundle in Work 365 as a nonbillable child subscription and there is a license quantity change made in the provider portal on the subscription, when it syncs back to Work 365 it would break the bundle because nonbillable child subscriptions of a bundle are required to have the same subscription quantity as the parent.