One Passport / Many Subscriptions

One of the restrictions in our current system is that all of our account management requires a single subscription to be associated with a single login (Passport). This makes the system simple (from our end, at least), but is a bit of a pain for the customer who owns multiple subscriptions and need to track a unique login for each. 

With the new Subscriber Downloads site you'll be able to add multiple subscriptions to your Passport, in several different ways:

• When going through the first-time user registration process, you'll have the opportunity to "add another" after every successful registration. This makes it easy if you have a bunch to do at once.
• From the Manage Subscription page (where you are taken after logging in to Passport) there'll be a set of Common Task links, one of which is "Add a new subscription"

Well, just two different ways, but the functionality is pretty accessible. If you have multiple subscriptions associated with your Passport there will be a pull-down menu showing all of your subscriptions - just select the subscription you want and click "Display". That subscription will be shown, and when you click on "Subscriber Downloads" the Subscriber Downloads page will open with the download content and keys for that subscription.

We had sort of thought that the whole multiple-subscriptions-per-login thing was a corner case, after all - subscriptions are licensed per-user so who would want to own more than one? Well, quite a lot of people as it turned out - it seemed that nearly everyone we talked to about doing this had a need for it so we did some additional revisions to make the feature prominent and usable. 

Andy Boyd
Program Manager
MSDN Subscriber Downloads