UP Administration via the Partner Center

Using Microsoft's Partner Center streamlines administering a customer's environment by allowing our technicians to use their own accounts for admin actions. This means more transparency and security for our customers. Audit logs are aware of the specific individuals making changes, and all technician accounts have their own MFA methods, so no need to share verification codes. Additionally, the Partner Center lets us use RBAC, centrally managing who can do what in customer environments.

Currently, these partner accounts aren't able to administer Universal Print. We can assign the Print Administration role to Partner Technicians, but they still get a 403 error when trying to access the admin panel. Our best guess as to why (echoed by MS support) is technically a lack of licensing on the accounts. Because these partner accounts are external to the customer's tenant, licenses can't be applied in-tenant (and even if you could, that would mean spending hundreds a month just for UP administration.) There may be other reasons why Partner Technicians can't administer UP but this one seems like the most obvious.

As a workaround, we are currently managing with a single print admin account. However, because of the lack of a clear audit trail and sub-optimal MFA setup, this approach is a dealbreaker for many of our customers. Resolving this licensing issue for partner accounts would not only make our jobs easier and give our customers better support, but it would also make selling Universal Print to our customers that much easer (or even possible, in many cases.)