About the author: David Starr is the founder and CEO of Cumulus26, where focus is on accelerating customer's Azure Marketplace journey from onboarding to business success. He is a former Principal Architect at Microsoft working on Azure Marketplace and a 6-time Microsoft MVP in Developer Tooling.
Why account structure matters in Partner Center
When first creating a Partner Center account, many Software Development Company (SDC) partners I’ve worked with dive straight into creating their transactable offers without first considering how their accounts are structured. This often leads to confusion about account setup, creating multiple “orphan” accounts, and support incidents that can delay the publication of your software to the Microsoft Marketplace--or even result in losing access to Partner Center.
This article examines Partner Center account structures and the primary decisions to make when setting up your company’s accounts in the portal. We’ll cover the following.
- Initial considerations: Individual accounts.
- Understanding organizational account structures and configurations.
- Working with important identifiers used in account management and support scenarios.
- Setting up for long-term successful management of your accounts.
This article ensures you’ll know how to structure your Microsoft Partner Center account so that it supports your organization’s needs today and can scale with you as you grow.
Understanding Partner Center account management
After initially creating your account, it’s tempting to skip user management and move on to other tasks in the portal. This can lead to the common mistake of failing to assign multiple account administrators right away. The predictable outcome is that if an account administrator leaves your organization, your staff could lose the ability to administer-- or even access-- Partner Center.
This may sound intuitive upon reading it, so why mention it? It’s because I have worked with many publishers who failed to do this and were later unable to get the access they needed. This leads to time spent resolving support incidents, which can delay publishing your solution.
Before diving into setting up an account, it’s helpful to understand there are three different accounts involved: Microsoft accounts, Azure Entra ID accounts, and Partner Center accounts. Although, the Microsoft account is essentially an extension of the Azure Entra ID account.
In short, you must have an Azure Entra ID account to have a Partner Center account. These account types are shown in the image below. Each has its own features and capabilities.
It is worth noting while you do need an Entra ID account, you do not need an Azure subscription, which allows creation of services like databases or virtual machines. This can be an important point for Azure administrators who provide accounts strictly for use with Partner Center.
Setting up an Azure tenant in Partner Center
Azure accounts for your organization are stored in tenants, which provide identity, security, and account management through Microsoft Entra ID. At least one tenant must be associated with Partner Center to manage the portal’s accounts. This allows those with accounts in the tenant to also have accounts in Partner Center.
You may associate a pre-existing Entra ID account with Partner Center, or you may create one if needed. Regardless of which technique you use, you can manage users and permissions for Partner Center after configuring your tenant.
User accounts
After configuring your tenant, head over to the user management screen in Account settings, then select User management in the left side menu. As we mentioned earlier, the next account you’ll want to configure is another Global administrator.
If you created the Azure tenant you are working with, you already have Global Administrator permissions in Partner Center. Otherwise, you may need to contact your Azure administrator to get the permissions you need. This is why it’s common (and good) practice for organizations with pre-existing Azure tenants to have an Azure administrator initially set up Partner Center.
Adding another Partner Center administrator
For this next step, there are three options for adding that new person to Partner Center:
- Create new user – Used if there are no other user accounts in the tenant.
- Add existing user – Use this if there are existing user accounts in the tenant.
- Invite outside user – May be used for inviting someone from outside your organization to manage Partner Center for you.
Regardless of which method you choose, since you are adding a second Global administrator, give them that role during account setup. This is the first role listed in the account setup process as shown here.
Configuring partner global and location accounts
Now that you have at least two global administrators, you can turn your attention to setting up your organizational accounts. There are two types in Partner Center.
- Partner global account (PGA)
- Partner location account (PLA)
Structuring your accounts
There is one PGA per SDC and one or more PLAs. A PGA is an overarching account containing contact and other information for your organization. Each PLA account represents a different location for the organization. A single PLA is created when you first create a Partner Center account. This may be enough for some organizations, but for many SDCs it’s a good idea to consider how you will organize the company and its products in the future.
See the image below for a typical example of PGA and PLA structures, the information associated with them, and their roles.
Some organizations may want multiple PLAs to represent different sales centers or divisions within the SDC. It’s also a good idea for smaller SDCs to consider future growth at this stage. Think about how and where your company may eventually do business. However, you do not need multiple PLAs to sell your solution in multiple countries--you can sell worldwide even if you have only one PLA.
Both PGAs and PLAs have unique identifiers, examples of which are shown in the below image. You may need to access these when working with Microsoft. To do so, go to:
Account Settings > Identifiers > Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program
Managing publisher accounts and identifiers
Each PLA has one or more publisher accounts, which are established when enrolling in the Microsoft Marketplace program. Each publisher also receives its own set of identifiers, and it’s common to be asked for these in customer support scenarios. When creating a new publisher, you get to specify your publisher account’s primary ID, but a second Seller ID is automatically assigned for you.
To access publisher IDs, visit:
Account settings > Identifiers > Publisher
Tax and payment profiles-- used by Microsoft to bill on your behalf and to pay you for customer purchases-- are associated with publisher accounts. Publisher accounts are sometimes used by different billing departments or to organize products into logical groups. See the image below for a typical example.
As you can see, the account structure is straightforward. If you consider it in advance of setting up Partner Center, you will be more likely to avoid configuration mistakes and be set up well for future growth.
Organizing offers and plans for marketplace publishing
We’ve seen how to structure user and organizational accounts to ensure a great Partner Center experience. When it’s time to set up your products to sell in the marketplace there are two more entities involved, offers and plans.
Offers represent your base software product and plans are used to sell one or more SKUs of the product. For example, Cumulus26’s AMPup solution for marketplace publishers may be our offer, and has different plans for team, professional, and enterprise versions. To support global software sales, each plan is associated with one or more global markets. For example, a US-based publisher may sell software in Canada, the UK, and Germany. Selling markets are designated for each plan.
Of course, each offer and plan receives its own ID. For each, you must specify the ID as you create each entity, and I recommend planning a logical naming convention for these IDs as you may need to navigate marketplace features using them at some point.
Now you have a complete picture of Partner Center structures from PGAs all the way to plans as shown in the image below, which represents a single-region seller. This turns out to be the most common Partner Center account configuration due to its simplicity and the needs of most SDCs.
Conclusion: Building for scalability and support
There is a strong relationship between Microsoft Azure Entra ID and Partner Center accounts. For many SDCs the simplest path to successful user management is to start with an Entra ID Global Administrator setting up your initial Partner Center account. Don’t forget the important first step of adding a second Partner Center account administrator.
You are now ready to model your organization and products in Partner Center, from PLAs and PGAs to offers and plans. You also understand the ID structures of each entity. You can refer to this article for help on where to find them when needed.
With a solid understanding of Partner Center user and organizational account structures, you are ready to begin configuring your users and organization in Partner Center.
