Release Notes (September/October)
Microsoft Commerce Experience Support
Cloudmore now fully supports the price management and billing of all the onetime billing licensing:
Azure Plan
Reserved Instances
Microsoft Subscriptions
Marketplace Services
Price management
Price management for One Time Services is carried out at the Broker level under the Microsoft Azure service > Price Adjustment. The new price management page allows a broker to make a positive or negative price adjustment to the varying source price.
A broker may define prices on either broker, organization, or subscription level. The lower level will take precedence, so if a subscription level adjustment is applied, it will override the organization and broker level. If the Organization level is set, it will override the broker level.
Check out this knowledge base article for more details - How do I manage my Azure pricing?
Billing report
The Azure billing report page has been updated to support the new Microsoft Azure Plan model. The Azure billing page graphs now include both the Microsoft Azure Classic model and the new Azure Plan model. Billing data is displayed in a table with a column that specifies the license type.
A user may either download the billing details as a Microsoft Excel file or view data in the user interface. An overview section highlights the billing data's key values, total cost, total sales, total price adjustment, largest customers, and largest categories.
The billing details section allows a user to list all organizations and drill down to see a granular breakdown of the billing data.
The organization-level Microsoft Azure billing report has also been updated to support the new model.
Microsoft Azure Plan billing API
To enable brokers to integrate the Microsoft Azure Plan billing data with external systems, Cloudmore has added three more API calls.
The GET AzureOneTimeInvoiceList allows a broker to retrieve a list of all Microsoft Azure onetime billing reports with dates and the Microsoft invoice number.
The POST AzureOneTimeInvoice/generateReport will initiate the gathering of the Microsoft Azure onetime report. Please note that generating the report may take several minutes or longer, depending on the amount of data in the report.
The GET AzureOneTimeInvoice/{taskId} will retrieve the report once it is prepared and ready for download.
For further information view the Swagger document here - https://api.cloudmore.com/swagger/
Enforce a trial period for products
When setting up a product under a custom service, a user can now enable a new feature that will enforce a trial period for the product. This means that an end-user doesn’t get the option to choose if a trial should be selected, and instead, the trial will always be enabled when setting up a new subscription. The trial check box and number of days will still be shown to end-users but can’t be edited.
Custom properties for services
It's now possible to create custom properties for services. These properties will be displayed to the user when the user adds a service from the E-store. The custom properties can be used to collect and store information from users that is needed to provision the service. Each property can be marked as ‘mandatory’ to force the user to enter the required information. A property can be displayed as a textbox, dropdown, or checkbox. A property can also be hidden from users to store information related to the service.
Manual billing lines for Sellers & UI update
Manual billing lines were previously introduced for Brokers. The feature allows for additional billing lines to be added to an organization’s billing report. The same functionality has now been added for Sellers to allow for additional billing lines to be added to a broker's billing report. Manual billing lines can be added either through the user interface or through API.
The user interface for manual billing lines on both broker and seller level has been updated to make it easier to find the right service, subscription, and product. Textboxes have been replaced with dropdowns where the user easily can choose from the available options.
Admin Roles updates
More Broker admin roles have been added in this release to provide greater flexibility when granting permissions and access rights to admins. You can view the new roles matrix here - Admin Roles Matrix
Maximum quantities for services
Previously a user could specify a minimum quantity for a product they added to Cloudmore. In this release, we have also introduced a maximum quantity. When you set a maximum quantity for a product, a user can’t add a number of licensees greater than the maximum value you have set. This feature can be useful if you need to create a product with incremental quantity-based pricing when adding your different services to Cloudmore.
Limit service links
In August, we introduced service links that enable you to create external links or pages for a service. In this release, we added capabilities to limit service links to the broker view only. This feature will allow a seller to publish links and pages only visible to brokers and can be used to share information or price lists with brokers for example.
CSP billing report update
More properties were added to the API call that returns Microsoft O365 CSP billing data GET/api/resellers/{resellerId}/billing/cspreports/MonthlyBillingPerOrganization
We now include the following extra properties:
Customer number
Subscription ID
Friendly Name
Subscription start date
Subscription end date
Billing cycle
Billing type
Charge start date