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Introduction: New commerce public sector offers

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Appropriate roles: Admin agent | Sales agent

Note

The new commerce experiences for license-based services include many new capabilities and are available to all Cloud Solution Provider (CSPs). For more information, see new commerce experiences overview.

Microsoft is releasing the public sector (PubSec) product SKUs in new commerce on March 1, 2024. Public sector offers enable new commerce product SKUs for education, nonprofit, and government community cloud (GCC) customers.

Release waves

Microsoft is releasing the new commerce public sector product SKUs in waves. The first wave starts on March 1, 2024. This first wave includes most of the expected, anticipated, high-volume offers. Further waves are scheduled to follow on a monthly basis.

  • Wave 1: March 1, 2024
  • Wave 2: March 1, 2024
  • Wave 3: April 1, 2024
  • Wave 4: May 1, 2024

Price list preview files are available a month prior to release. Wave 1 and 2 product SKUs with pricing were made available on February 1, 2024.

PubSec qualification

There are no changes to how customers are qualified for the new commerce PubSec product SKUs. Customers qualified for the traditional legacy license-based PubSec offers are also qualified for the new commerce PubSec product SKUs. The process for updating a customer's qualification to allow them to acquire education, nonprofit, and GCC doesn't change between legacy and new commerce. To learn more about special segments in Partner Center, see Sell to specialized industries, like education, non-profit, and government.

New commerce multiqualification support

Partners will have the ability to qualify a customer as both nonprofit and education after January 2024. There are no changes to how qualifications work or are executed. Customers acquire either nonprofit or education product SKUs based on their qualifications. Customers that are both education and nonprofit can purchase both types of product SKUs.

Migration

Migrating PubSec legacy offers to new commerce works the same way as commercial migrations. Each offer that supports migration has a Yes in the Supports Migration column in the legacy offer matrix's NCE Mapping tab. The compatible product SKUs are also documented for any migration supported offers. To learn more about migration in the new commerce, see Migrate subscriptions to new commerce. Microsoft-led migration will start with offers renewing after September 1, 2024. These schedules give partners more time to transition their customers to new commerce PubSec before MS-Led migration happens.

The NCE mapping tab in the legacy offer matrix includes information about the public sector product SKU release waves.

  • Segment: This column indicates the segment for the offer or new commerce product SKU.
  • NCE Pubsec Wave: This column identifies which wave the new commerce equivalent is expected.
  • NCE Availability: This column indicates when the new commerce product SKU is expected to become available.

Note

Information about product SKU expected waves might change from one month to the next. Partners should rely on the price list preview a month before product SKUs are released to definitively answer questions about product SKUs that are about to be released in the coming month. SKU IDs are only available for the coming month and will be updated on a monthly basis. The December offer matrix will only have SKU IDs for wave 1.

PubSec offers and product SKUs

Legacy PubSec organized purchasable items by offer ID. New commerce items are based on the product SKU Ids. In some cases, the provisioning ID, the SKU that gets provisioned when the offer is purchased, is the same between the commercial and PubSec product SKUs, however, the SKU IDs are distinct per segment. For example, a commercial SKU ID for Business Basic is 0001 and provision O365_BUSINESS_ESSENTIALS. The Nonprofit SKU ID might be 0004 but also provision the same provisioned product SKU O365_BUSINESS_ESSENTIALS. Limits for maximum licenses are aligned to the SKU ID. SKU IDs have the format: 0001 and can exist across partners or other channels. It's possible for a partner to have 300 licenses of 0001 and 300 licenses for 0004 because the maximum is aligned to the SKU ID.

Add-ons in new commerce PubSec

Add-ons in new commerce are different than legacy. To learn more, see Introduction: New commerce add-ons. Important notes about PubSec add-ons in new commerce:

  • Add-ons in new commerce aren't applied to the base subscription. New commerce add-ons are purchased from the catalog experiences. Prerequisites are enforced when purchasing the add-on in the cart.
  • Prerequisites for add-ons can be found in the new commerce offer list matrix.
  • Add-ons can be set to end date with other subscriptions, the base subscriptions. Partners can learn about coterminosity in the Align new commerce experience subscription end dates.
  • New commerce does support add-ons across segments. It's possible for a partner to have a PubSec base subscription and then acquire commercial add-ons as long as the add-on supports the prerequisite. Prerequisites can be found in the new commerce offer matrix in the Partner Center pricing workspace.

Government Community Cloud (GCC)

Details about how GCC works are documented in the special segment documentation at Sell to specialized industries, like education, non-profit, and government. The process and requirements don't change between legacy and new commerce GCC. GCC new commerce offers are scheduled to be available April 1, 2024. The availability of GCC new commerce offers will also enable legacy to new commerce migration paths if compatibly new commerce product SKUs exist. Partners can review the legacy offer matrix NCE Mapping tab for more clarity.

Government Pricing Commercial offers

Some partners might have subscriptions for government pricing offers. These government pricing offers were short lived commercial offers (not GCC) and were removed from the catalog and price list in 2018. These offers were only available for a year and eventually priced to match the commercial pricing. Partners should consult with customers that have government pricing subscriptions and either acquire commercial new commerce SKUs. Government pricing offer subscriptions in legacy stop renewing after January 2024. Partners can view the offers scheduled for retirement in the CSP Offer Retirement Guide.

Promotions

Details of upcoming promotions are shared in the Global Promo Readiness Guide.

APIs and Sandbox testing

There are no required API changes to enable partners to transact new commerce PubSec. The APIs released in new commerce in January 2022 are the same APIs PubSec partners use for migration. These APIs can be found in the migration topic. Details about changes to provisioning, billing, and subscription management processes involved in the new commerce experience are outlined in the CSP New Commerce Handbook.

In response to partners' requests, Microsoft enable some PubSec scenarios easier to validate in sandbox:

  1. Verifying customer tenants: Partners want to qualify PubSec customers before going through the official Partner Center vetting process.
  2. Testing SKU purchases: Public sector partners want to test new commerce offers in a sandbox environment to ensure the offers are working as expected before deploying to their customers.

Partners with education customers can test the customer tenant qualification process in sandbox as of January 1, 2024.

Note

CSP integration sandbox supports testing of commercial and educational offers. Nonprofit and Government Community Cloud segments are not yet supported.

Information about migration APIs is found in the new commerce migration topic. Information about sandbox testing for EDU offers are available in the sandbox testing content as of January 2024.

Important PubSec milestones

Effective August 1, 2024, partners will no longer be able to purchase new per user subscriptions in the Microsoft legacy system.

To assist CSP partners who will transition their nonprofit, education, and US GCC customers to new commerce in 2024, Microsoft will continue to pay legacy incentives through March 31, 2025. Incentives in CSP new commerce went into effect October 2021 and are earned and paid through the Microsoft Commerce Incentive (MCI) program. Incentives for legacy CSP public sector legacy offers are paid through March 31, 2025; after that date, any legacy subscription still in effect won't generate monthly incentive earnings/payments to the partner.