Microsoft Online Service Planning
Overview
The Microsoft Online Service for Atria allows Customers and the service desk to manage tenants, licenses, users and features of Office 365 – with no access to the 365 admin portal. It reduces your risk, while still being able to effectively manage your customers.
Atria adds comprehensive management capability to both direct and indirect Microsoft Cloud Service Providers.
Core features include:
- Azure AD Tenant creation *
- Azure domain provisioning
- Add, update and suspend Microsoft Subscriptions *
- Auto-increase subscriptions as needed *
- Subscription optimization *
- Plan templates which include add-ons and service plans
- Provisioning of users into Azure Active Directory
- Simultaneous user provisioning into AD and Azure AD
- Assignment of licenses to end-users
- Tenant connect – for rapid onboarding of existing Office 365 tenants and subscriptions
- Provisioning of mail aliases into Exchange Online
* = Features can only be used by Microsoft Partners with a direct billing relationship due to API restrictions.
Partner Center Connections
Microsoft Partner Center for CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) is a prerequisite item to have set up prior to deploying the Microsoft Online service, this applies to both Direct and in-Direct Partners. Atria allows Service Providers to have multiple connections to Microsoft Partner Center in accordance with Microsoft security guidelines. This allows selling across regions, support for Sandbox tenants and also caters for resellers who may wish to use their own Partner Center connection.
Each Microsoft PartnerCenter account is able to provision customers and subscriptions into the Microsoft region associated with your Partner account. Each region contains a set of pre-defined countries. If you are selling into multiple regions then a Partner Center account will exist for each region.
It is possible to configure multiple Partner Center connections to Atria. This is only available to users with the “Service Provider” role.
When provisioning customers with the Azure AD service, the appropriate PartnerCenter Connection can be selected – this controls the Partner Center connection and the baseline settings. These can be overridden for Resellers or Customers, but in general, are used to default settings.
How Licence Optimisation works
This only applies to Direct providers as this process adjusts license quantities.
The license optimization process is executed nightly, it will retrieve all subscriptions – including Add-on subscriptions, any unused licenses are removed from the subscription.
Note - It will only reduce licenses that have been provided by the Direct Provider, if there are licenses provided by other partner(s) they will not be reduced.
Note that when de-provisioning or changing licenses on individual users spare licenses will not be removed. The license optimization process which runs as part of the sync is the only time the actual licenses are removed from the subscription.
It is hence important that you monitor the running of this synchronization process to ensure that this executes daily.
Tracking and Billing Microsoft Online services
As users are added and removed from subscriptions, these will be tracked via the billing transactions at the User Plan level. Transactions are based on assignments to and from users. If you bill based on licenses assigned to customers, then this quantity may differ based on whether or not the licenses have been assigned to users.
Bulk Provisioning Users with Microsoft Services
If you are onboarding a company with new Microsoft Services, loading more than one user or wanting to make a wholesale change on features within a plan, the bulk provisioning feature can simplify and speed this process.
For Direct providers, Atria will automatically increase the subscription volume as needed for each individual subscription. The operation to increase the size of a subscription can be time-consuming, by default this will occur for every user. So if bulk provisioning 100 users, this will require a subscription increase for every user being processed. To speed a large operation, you are able to update the subscriptions directly in Partner Center – the provisioning process will then allocate from here without needing to adjust subscriptions quantities.
Service deployment tasks
In general, deploying the Microsoft Online service involves the following tasks:
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Tasks
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Knowledgebase Article |
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1. Deploying the Azure AD Schema
2. Deploying the Microsoft Online (MSOL) Schema
3. Deploying the Microsoft Online (MSOL) Web Service
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4. Connecting to Microsoft Partner Center
5. Syncronize Offers from Microsoft Partner Center
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6. Configure User Plans
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7. Configure the Service
8. Provision the Service to Resellers
9. Provision the Service to Customers
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Related Knowledgebase Articles
The following articles provide additional information related to the Microsoft Online Service:
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Topic
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Knowledgebase Article
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Allow Resellers to use their own Partner Center for their customers
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Configure Microsoft Online to use ADFS for authentication |
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Troubleshooting User and Service issues with the Microsoft Online Service
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Synchronizing Atria with Office 365
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How to deprovision Microsoft Online Services from a Customer
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