Advisor to CSP Transitions and avoiding the Lose Access to Office 365 emails that can follow

Todd Sweetser

Hi Cloud Partners!

We know that many partners are taking a serious look at the Cloud Solution Provider program as an avenue to procure and manage your Microsoft cloud customers, be it Office 365, CRM Online, Enterprise Mobility Suite and/or Azure. There are many benefits to this program, ultimately about giving you as the partner more control over the billing and first level support of the services. Of course, this will relate to more revenue, both from services you provide as well as margin.

With this, many of you are looking at transitioning your current customers (generally customers who have acquired via the Advisory (or direct) method where the customer uses a Credit Card (or PO) and engages with Microsoft directly for the billing) to the CSP option, usually via one of the distributors that offer this. 

We have heard from partners that sometimes as a part of this transition, an email that can cause some confusion is being sent to your customers. It’s title is “You’re about to lose access to your Office 365 Subscription” and will appear similar to this:

LoseAccessWarning

 

As part of the transition process there are 2 steps that a customer will be required to do. One is to approve you as their CSP Partner, and the second (and important step to avoid the above messaging) is to cancel their previous Advisor subscription. Until this is completed, the customer will continue to be billed by Microsoft and you will also be billed for the CSP subscription. No refunds or credits will be granted.

There are 2 options that a customer can use to accomplish this task:

Option 1: Customer calls into support to cancel via https://portal.office.com/Support/ContactUs.aspx

Option 2: Customers with fewer than 25 licenses assigned to users can cancel the subscription via the Office 365 Admin portal at: https://portal.office.com/admin/default.aspx#Billing

The entire Advisory to CSP transition process is spelled out and available via a great Office Mix presentation that is available, I do recommend going to Advisor to CSP Transition Guidance to review.

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Thanks, and good selling!