Tutorial: Consolidate or migrate customers between partner tenants

2024-09-20

Applies to: Partner Center | Partner Center for Microsoft Cloud for US Government

Appropriate roles: Admin agent

This page teaches you how to consolidate tenants for your business. Here are some important points to keep in mind:

There's a limit of 300 subscriptions per tenant.
Consolidation of tenants can be across countries/regions but is confined to the partner's region.
Be aware of all of the provisioned subscriptions and license counts for each of your customers in the account you're transitioning from; the same subscriptions and license counts get reprovisioned under the new central Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) account as part of the transfer process.
Once consolidation is complete, you can't revert to the previous tenant state. Customer action might also be required.

This tutorial helps you learn how to:

Establish relationships between the new partner account and customer accounts
Transfer new commerce license-based subscriptions
Transfer legacy subscriptions
Use the export list feature to help create a list of customers to move over to the centralized tenant

Prerequisites

Prepare for transitions:
1. Sign in to Partner Center with the transitioning account (the one you transition to the new account), and review of all customers and all of the services provisioned for those customers.
2. Sign out of this account.
For a self-serve subscription transfer, the transitioning partner must ensure their customer has a relationship with their indirect provider before transferring subscriptions associated with a given customer.
1. Customers must accept the Microsoft Customer Agreement through the Indirect Provider.
Establish relationships between new partner account and customer accounts:
1. Sign in to Partner Center with the new partner account (the one you're transitioning customers into) and select Customers.
2. Select Request a reseller relationship. You're presented with a default email message to send to your customers. This message contains a URL with the org ID unique to your new Partner Center account.
3. Customer Action: Ensure that each of the active customers you want to transfer visits this URL. When they open the URL, customers are prompted to sign in to the Office 365 portal. The customer signs in using the same Org ID that they use to access the Azure and Office 365 admin portals.
4. After they sign in, the Global Admin for the customer account is prompted to submit an agreement that gives granular delegated admin privileges (GDAP) admin privileges to the new CSP account. If they agree, the customer selects the checkbox, and agrees to authorize the relationship.
  
  The customers will appear in the partner's customer list after they submit the agreement.

Transfer new commerce license-based subscriptions

Transacting direct bill or indirect providers can transfer Azure plan items and new commerce license-based subscriptions. Partners with legacy Azure or license-based subscriptions can follow the instructions for legacy transfers.

To transfer a new commerce experiences (NCE) license-based subscription to a new partner, follow these steps:

The customer and the current partner (source partner) have conversations and agree to transfer the subscription to another different partner (target partner).
The source partner and target partner have conversations to understand all details about the subscriptions to transfer.
The target partner sends a relationship request to the customer with subscriptions to transfer.
The customer accepts the relationship request.
The target partner creates a transfer request to the current source partner. They include the customer email to receive the notifications and the source partner's Microsoft ID.
The source partner receives an email notification of the transfer request, or completed transfers by viewing the events in their audit log.
The source partner opens the transfer request and decides which subscriptions to transfer. The source partner then submits the transfer request.
The system creates a new subscription for the customer on the target partners billing account. The system also cancels the old subscription under the source partner's billing account.

Learn more about transferring new commerce subscriptions.

Note

You can also use Partner Center API/SDK to transfer the existing subscriptions to your indirect provider. To learn more, read the following articles in the Partner Center developer documentation.

For more information about API registration, see Set up API access in Partner Center.

Transfer traditional (legacy) subscriptions

Partners might still have traditional legacy Azure or license-based subscriptions. The transfer process is different from new commerce transfers.

Legacy Office 365 and non-Azure usage-based subscriptions

Once your customer signs the agreement, you can recreate their subscriptions under your Centralized Partner Tenant.
Sign in to Partner Center and select Customers.
Open the company name for the customer you want to transfer.
Select Add subscription.
Add the correct subscriptions and license counts from the catalog. Verify with the information provided in the Transitioning From partner accounts.
Select Submit.

The services are now provided to the customer from the transitioning to partner account.
Repeat these steps to transfer subscriptions for all remaining customers.

Before proceeding to the next section, ensure all customer subscriptions existing under the Transitioning From partner accounts are reprovisioned under the Transitioning To partner account.

Note

Partners must suspend subscriptions on the transitioning from partner tenant account in Partner Center the same day that those subscriptions are transitioned and set up under the Transitioning to partner tenant account in the Partner Center to ensure double billing does not occur. Support requests will be denied for credits due to any overlap in billing that occurs from not correctly disabling the Transitioning from subscriptions.

Disable the Office 365 subscriptions under the transitioning from partner account

Disabling the CSP subscription under the Transitioning from partner accounts stops any future billing. You don't have to manually disable Azure subscriptions, because Azure subscriptions are automatically disabled during the transfer process.

Sign in to Partner Center with the transitioning from CSP account and go to the customer list.
Open the customer with subscriptions to disable, and then select the first offer to disable.
Set the subscription to suspended, and then select submit.

Note

Suspending the subscription ensures double billing does not occur. Partners can only suspend legacy license-based subscriptions. Partners with questions about canceling or suspending new commerce license-based subscriptions should contact partner support.

The subscription shows suspended on the subscriptions list.
Repeat these steps for all subscriptions under the customer. Verify all show suspended.
Select the next customer on the list and repeat the process of disabling all subscriptions.

Legacy Azure usage-based subscriptions

Unlike the Office 365 CSP subscriptions, Azure, usage-based CSP subscriptions don't need to be transferred manually. Microsoft Azure Support transfers the Azure subscriptions and all deployed services or resources from the Transitioning from CSP reseller accounts to the Transitioning to CSP reseller account. Customer's services aren't disrupted during the transition.

Ensure the customer accounts with the Azure subscriptions transferred have accepted the agreement to be associated with the new Transitioning to CSP account.
Notify Microsoft of which customer accounts are ready to transfer, and provide those customer's company names.
Microsoft transfers the Azure usage-based subscriptions and notifies you when the transfer is complete.
You need to confirm that the Azure subscription under the Transitioning from CSP reseller account now is marked suspended in Partner Center under the customer subscriptions section.
Confirm that the Azure subscription under the Transitioning to CSP reseller account now shows a status of active in Partner Center under the customer subscriptions section.

Note

Disabling the subscriptions under the customer doesn't change the appearance of the customer in the Customers list. There is currently no option to remove customers from the list. Partners should avoid adding subscriptions back to these customers from their Transitioning from account in the future.
Repeat these steps for all subscriptions under all of your customers to stop future charges on the Transitioning from accounts. The partner receives a final invoice. It has a credit unused days between the day of cancellation and the last day of the billing period. No future invoices will generate after that final billing period.

Additional information

Disabling the subscription from the transitioning from CSP account doesn't affect the end customer's service as long as the service was provisioned from the Transitioning to CSP account before disabling the subscription.
Subscriptions can't be used by the customer and don't generate charges when suspended or canceled.
There's currently no way to remove a customer completely from the Customers list.

Note

Partners must suspend subscriptions on the transitioning from partner tenant account in Partner Center the same day those subscriptions are transitioned to and set up under the transitioning to account to ensure double billing does not occur. Microsoft will not support requests for credits due to any overlap in billing that occurs from not correctly setting the transitioning from subscriptions to suspended.

Simplify transfers using Export

Using the Export Function, you can capture the subscriptions you need to use in your new consolidated structure:

Sign in to Partner Center and select Customers.
Select the customer name.
On the Subscriptions page, select Export Subscriptions to export details of subscriptions to an Excel file.
Use this list to recreate the subscriptions in your new consolidated tenant.