Navigating the New Commerce Experience from Microsoft
Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience (NCE) is a pivotal change in the way partners and small businesses purchase and manage license-based services like Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Intune. Introduced to offer more flexibility, simplified billing, and enhanced capabilities, NCE is reshaping the purchasing landscape. This blog post, brought to you by O’Brien Media, a proud Microsoft Partner, aims to elucidate the changes under the NCE programme and how they impact small businesses.
Embracing New Capabilities:
The New Commerce Experience is not just about what partners are purchasing; it’s more about how they are purchasing and managing. It introduces new capabilities allowing more flexibility in managing services, new pricing and add-on options, and a simplified and enhanced billing experience. Partners can control subscription renewals, upgrade partial seats when moving to new SKUs, and schedule changes to subscriptions that take effect at the end of terms.
Flexibility and Pricing Options:
NCE brings forth new pricing and add-on options, providing the ability to get pricing for services programmatically through APIs and more flexibility to acquire add-on services. The new monthly term options give partners more flexibility for their businesses, allowing them to adapt to the changing needs of their small business clients swiftly.
Simplified Billing:
Billing under NCE has been consolidated and enhanced, making billing dates consistent and supporting monthly, annual, or three-year terms for many subscriptions. This simplification in billing is designed to assist small businesses in managing their finances more effectively, avoiding any complexities related to mid-month date variations.
Consistency in Workflow:
While NCE introduces several new features and enhancements, many aspects of how partners do business in Partner Center remain unchanged. The common tasks and workflows, such as creating customers and purchasing and managing scenarios for software subscriptions, perpetual software, Azure services, and marketplace offers, continue to be consistent, ensuring a seamless transition for partners and small businesses.
Learning and Adapting:
Partners have the choice to continue purchasing traditional, license-based services or to embrace the new commerce experience. It is crucial for partners and small businesses to familiarize themselves with how the new commerce license-based services work to leverage the enhancements and new scenarios introduced by NCE effectively.
Conclusion:
The New Commerce Experience by Microsoft is a transformative initiative offering enhanced flexibility, simplified billing, and new capabilities for managing services. Small businesses, with the assistance of Microsoft Partners like O’Brien Media, can navigate through these changes efficiently, ensuring optimal utilization of the services and adapting to the new enhancements introduced by NCE.
Call to Action:
To explore how the New Commerce Experience can be advantageous for your small business and to understand more about the new capabilities and flexibility it offers, contact O’Brien Media, your trusted Microsoft Partner, today.