Forum Discussion
FYI - Partners struggling with Verification
Hi. I've been going through this process for almost 60 days now. Here's what I've learned:
1. The vetting / verification team is *not* here to help you through the process. They are simply binary - do your documents conform to what they want, or not. If not, there is no explanation as to *why* not, so don't expect it.
2. Normal Microsoft Support staff (i.e., JillArmour , MS Partner Support, etc.) have zero influence and zero visibility into the verification process. The best they can do is make you feel better that someone else knows this is fubar, but they have as much power as you.
3. ASfP reps, even using the magic "Get Help / Escalation Manager" keywords are also equally useless.
After my initial attempt reached the complete end of line/out of options (i.e., they no longer offer the Fix Now), I created a whole new tenant and domain. I registered the domain WITH Microsoft. Don't do this. Microsoft doesn't charge for the first year of the new tenant custom domain name, and therefore, there is no invoice available to send to the verification team. Why doesn't a domain bought from MS auto-qualify? Who knows? It is literally a black hole.
With Inspire next week, this is a good time to try to raise the issue with Nicole Dezen, Chief Partner Officer for MS. I have been unable to obtain any name of anyone else at MS lower than her who has any authority or visibility into whoever they are outsourcing the verification to.
Good luck. We have been (with my other firm) a partner with MS for almost 15 years. Whenever I hear how easy it is to become a developer ISV partner with MS, I laugh. Two months of frustration is *anything* but easy.
M
5 Replies
- I realize this thread is nearly a year old, however, I'm experiencing issues similar to this as well. I have submitted EIN, State entity reg, etc., dox, State website screenshot showing business relationships & account in good standing, SUTA (all of which should have been more than enough), plus domain receipt, plus WHOIS output, plus host receipt showing domain not expiring until at least a year from now.
And what I get back is a canned response that basically says "none of that computes give us these things" which I've submitted.
I'm convinced the "vetting operations support" department lacks comprehension and likely is unable to do simple date math.
This has been going on for a month now and has jeopardized my client's Defender Business licenses because of the ludicrous delay. Those licenses expired yesterday.
I have called Ms. Dezen's office twice, leaving messages. The first message has not been returned, I don't expect the second one to be answered either.
This process should have taken no more than 24 hours and yet here we are today. - I couldn't have said it better.
To add to the other potential ways to get this sorted, one option I tried this morning was to create a new tenant as part of the Partner registration process. Unfortunately, my original partner account registration hadn't been deleted when I tried and I couldn't delete it myself from the "Identifiers" page so will have to raise a support ticket and try again.
Maybe someone can give that a try and let us know if it works. I won't be able to try it again until support deletes my current account.
I agree with what you said about JillArmour and other MS staff re their hands being tied as well. Thanks JillArmour for all your efforts. - JillArmour
Community Manager
MDFBSW in response to your statement above I am not part of the support team, I manage the Partner community. 🙂
I try to help partners by sharing documents and steps needed to pass verification but as you said I have no visiablity into the verification support ticket system. You have to use the support team to get verified. That is the only way and I'm sorry it has been a poor experience for you and many others.
- My apologies. I guess I meant potential support options. I appreciated your attempts to assist with something outside your scope.
Mike- My approval finally came through this evening. I didn't do anything different; I just left it in its rejected state for the past few days so, unfortunately, I can't give any substantive advice on how to resolve the issue. Perhaps, the backlog the support team is dealing with is part of the issue but there's clearly more that needs to be done to alleviate the frustrations we've been experiencing.
The more we can shed light on this issue, the more the relevant powers that be within Microsoft can understand the scale of the problem.
