Key Partner Center Features

Summary

This video, the second in a series by the Azure Government Engineering Team, explores essential features of the Partner Center for CSPs. It delves into navigating sales tabs, accessing price lists, using the CSP pricing calculator, and managing billing through detailed invoices and usage reports. It also covers monitoring customer budgets and accessing support tickets and promotional materials in the Partner Center.

Highlights

• Navigate to the sales tab to access pricing and offers, crucial for handling customer quotes. 📊
• Be mindful of using the CSP pricing calculator for exclusive benefits. 📈
• Essential documents, including self-serve authorization letters, are available for download. 📄
• Stay updated with the latest promotions and catalogs offered to partners. 🎉
• The support tab helps in tracking every customer request efficiently. 🛠️
• The billing tab offers detailed insights into balances and customer expenditures. 💰
• Utilize usage-based CSV and APIs for in-depth customer billing analysis. 🖥️
• Set up customer budgets and receive notifications to prevent overspending. 🔔

Key Takeaways

• Learn to navigate the sales tab for critical pricing and offers. 📊
• Exclusive benefits with the CSP pricing calculator ease billing scenarios. 📈
• Essential documents for CSPs are easily accessible for administrative needs. 📄
• Keep updated with latest promotions through the partner center. 🎉
• Efficiently track customer requests and billing via the support and billing tabs. 🛠️💰
• Set up and monitor customer budgets effectively to manage overspending risks. 🔔

Overview

In this insightful second video by the Azure Government Engineering Team, we dive deep into the workings of the Partner Center for Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs). It’s not just about setting up an account or onboarding new customers; it's learning the ropes of the Partner Center, especially in crucial areas like sales, billing, and customer management.

The video walks us through various features, starting from navigating the sales tab where you can manage pricing and offers. It also highlights the perks that come with using the CSP pricing calculator, ensuring you leverage your CSP account for maximum benefits. Essential documents like authorization letters are conveniently accessible for download, streamlining your administrative processes.

For effective customer management, important tabs like support and billing are covered, showing how to track service requests or customer expenditures. There's a particular emphasis on budgeting for customers – set specific limits, get alerted as they near spending thresholds, and maintain control over resource usage with ease.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Key Features The chapter titled 'Introduction to Key Features' continues a series focused on setting up as a CSP (Cloud Solution Provider). The presenter recaps the first video, which covered account setup and creating a first customer. In this chapter, the emphasis shifts to exploring key features offered by the Partner Center, with a particular nod to the importance of the customer study.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Exploring the Sale Tab In this chapter titled 'Exploring the Sale Tab', the importance of the sale tab is highlighted as a crucial area where significant time is spent addressing customer queries and other scenarios. The chapter explains that by expanding the 'fill' button, one can access 'pricing and offers,' which includes essential information about pricing. It emphasizes the existence of a monthly published price list containing all SKUs, serving as the definitive source for all pricing information.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Pricing Calculator Benefits The chapter discusses the benefits of using the Pricing Calculator for various services, including clothes. It highlights that the calculator is available for both regular and special (CSP) pricing scenarios, emphasizing the need for users to log in with their CSP accounts to access all features and benefits.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Other Documents and Support Tab Chapter: Other Documents and Support Tab The chapter explains the process of logging into a CSP account using a specific example. It highlights a key difference that users will notice when logged into this type of account, compared to using a non-TSP account. This difference includes gaining access to an additional feature, demonstrated through the selection of a virtual machine within the platform.
• 04:00 - 06:00: Understanding the Billing Tab The chapter titled 'Understanding the Billing Tab' discusses the configuration options available in the billing tab of a particular service. Users can choose between different billing scenarios, such as 'pay-as-you-go' under the online services program or selecting a 'cloud solution provider'. The interface includes a drop-down at the calculator section to make this selection. The chapter hints at changes occurring on the billing interface, particularly noting changes on the right-hand side when selecting different cloud solution provider pricing options.
• 06:00 - 07:30: Customer Management and Budgets This chapter covers customer management and budgeting, focusing on using resources like the Partner Center for efficient finance tracking. Key components include utilizing price lists and calculators. Additionally, there is a mention of a self-serve Letter of Authorization document for download and use when required.
• 07:30 - 08:00: Conclusion and Wrap Up The chapter titled 'Conclusion and Wrap Up' discusses various applications and services offered by the federal government, particularly focusing on promotions and catalogs. Although no promotions are available at the moment, readers are encouraged to keep checking for updates. The chapter also emphasizes the importance of the 'support tab,' where customers can track their requests and support tickets, especially when dealing with Azure support, ensuring efficient management of customer service interactions.

Key Partner Center Features Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hey folks or batter up here during you again from the other government engineering team so if you recall this is our second video from a series that we've been doing about how to get you set up as a CSP in our previous video we talked about you know setting up your account creating your first customer now we're going to talk about a few of the key features that partner Center has in store for us so the customer study is something that we already touch upon and it's fairly fairly important but what
• 00:30 - 01:00 else is there here relevant for us to review so let's go into the sale tab self child is fairly important to get here is where you're going to be spending a lot of time answering customer code as well as other scenarios so when you expand the fill of the fill button you will see pricing and offers I think it offers you will see two very important things so first of it you will see that our our prices so every month we publish a prices with all the SKUs this is the source of truth this is where all of the prices for each and every single SKU is out there and you
• 01:00 - 01:30 will be able to view it use it for clothes use it for anything that you may need it and then also you have a link to the other services ESP pricing calculator so a lot of you are probably familiar with our with our pricing calculator that's out there that's where our pay as you go over the rest scenarios but you want to see us be have special benefits so make sure to review the person calculator for CSP remember to log in with your CSP account you need to make sure that your with with your
• 01:30 - 02:00 CSP account you're logging into it so for example if I open these guys I'll open it even using a new tab it's going to ask me to log in I'll do that and once you log in you will know that you're logged in as that that account and you'll have you will see one one additional feature that usually you wouldn't see if you're using your your nan TSP account and I'll show you what that looks like so I've selected a virtual machine for example to them to
• 02:00 - 02:30 configure and you can't you have a couple of scenarios to select fun if you if you scroll all the way down to the calculator you will see a drop down here that tells you whether you want the online services program which you saw pay-as-you-go or if you want your call solution provider which is select cloud solution provider things are going to change so just wait for this to load you will notice a little you will notice a little change here on the right but rotate cloud solution provider pricing
• 02:30 - 03:00 kabuna price as you provide applied so make sure to follow this tip it's something fairly fairly good for you as you work on building all these estimates so keep that in mind now let's go back to to our to our partner center so we talked a little bit about the calculator I show you where the price list is and there's a couple of other documents that may be relevant to you we have a self-serve letter of authorization that's also located here if you need it you can download it and use it for you
• 03:00 - 03:30 know different applications that the federal government may have for you promotions and catalogs all these things will be showing you the latest news and all the different things that we'll be sharing with partners at this time for this particular guy there's no promotions but make sure to check in in in awesome right support tab is where you will monitor every customer request that you open so when you open a ticket with the azure support a lot all of this
• 03:30 - 04:00 will show up here and you will be able to you know keep track of closed service requests of open service requests you will be able to filter them by customer and so on now billing is one other very important tab that you will really care about so let's go into the building and see what that has in store for it given that this denim has already had some usage you can definitely see you know a few of the benefits of this billing tab now you see a couple of things you will find your balance your three months or
• 04:00 - 04:30 six months or let's say a 12 month rolling average of how these guys has been spending and there's very few important documents really keep in mind there is your invoice this is a one view of an all up invoice that you get on a monthly basis so if you're you know in this case my company is called you know CSBG 8c FPGA is going to get a monthly invoice of in this case $11,000 but how do I know which customer of mine
• 04:30 - 05:00 spend up so this is where you going to the usage based CSV so you can do this via the CSV or also partner Center has a rich set of API so that you can leverage from the documentation to pull that you search as you need the CSV is is a file that if you open it up with it big Excel that will allow you to drill down to a customer level subscription level resource groups level even to every single VM that you need to review so make sure to check it out this will allow you to build your reporting and
• 05:00 - 05:30 build any additional data that you need to work and invoice your customers you will also be able to see here some of the history if I expand each one of these tabs I can see for every month my different invoice as well as my my data behind it now one last thing that I'll cover in this specific scenario those related to billing and a few of the areas here I'll go to my customers and I'll select one of my customers just to go into a little bit more detail so I
• 05:30 - 06:00 select I'll select on choice oh and I don't know if control so has done you know in usage or not but I know that they have a couple of prescriptions so control actually has done some spend they have spent thirteen dollars they've done some things right there so they have two subscriptions right now I can add more subscriptions here if I wanted to I can get some customer insights of them as they have more usage and when license based services become available in CSP for government you will be able
• 06:00 - 06:30 to manage those here now one of the things that I want to call out here is our budget so this allows you to set up a budget for your customer I've set up a one thousand monthly budget for them I'll click apply you can change it and what happens here is when they reach 80 90 and 100 percent of their budget well you will get an email and you will be able to alert them keep in mind that this is a soft budget it's not something that will cancel or or or you know put on hold any usage or subscription so don't worry about that but do make sure to monitor it often to
• 06:30 - 07:00 make sure that your customers are you know not exceeding their budget so with that we'll come to a rap about some of the key areas that you need to keep in mind of the purple Center and again make sure it's uni for some more videos and keep us posted if you have any questions thank you