Legacy contract terms going away at renewal?

[Steve_Leach1]

I am hearing that a customer currently on the old legacy CSP terms will be now forced into NCE terms at the renewal if that happens on or after July 1 2023.
Can you provide guidance on and if legacy contracts currently enforce will be forced to NCE or will clients maintain the option to stay on legacy terms for the upcoming renewal? The  NCE Playbook of course only defines what is current, which is that they can renew on legacy terms

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Steve_Leach1 

Without having the website link or document that you're referring to, I'm not sure of which announcement you're referring to. 

I've checked the partner center announcements and I do not see term changes applicable to your post. The only announcements that I'm guessing you could be referring to are:

• Microsoft has decided to continue supporting the legacy autorenewal functionality beyond July 11, 2022. I did not find documentation that this has changed.  Note: new orders of legacy CSP subscriptions are not allowed since those orders should be placed in the NCE/new commerce experience.  It’s best practice is to proactively migrate all subscriptions prior to their renewal date from Legacy to new commerce.
• There is an announcement to an update to the MCA agreement that is required for CSP, but the effective date is March '23...not July '23:

If neither are what you're asking about, please provide a link or file of the announcement/statements mentioned in your post.

If this (or someone else's) reply answers your question, please Accept as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly. Otherwise, please let me know if you need further assistance on this topic.

Regards,

Microsoft CSP Licensing Concierge

[#3]

@LicensingConcierge1 

I could not find anything in partner center either.

I had two clients today tell me this, so wanted to try and check the validity via microsoft vs what another csp may be telling potential clients.

thank you 

[#4]

I attend the monthly CSP technical series with Microsoft and I don't recall anything on forcing legacy renewal to NCE yet. I honestly wish Microsoft would enforce this, so I would be delighted if that were the case.

Perhaps your clients are referring to an older, pre-July 2022, announcement that an enforcement would be in place, which was then rescinded by Microsoft in this partner center announcement.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/announcements/2022-july#8

Since July 2022, all new commercial subscription purchases had to be NCE, with the exception of some legacy Dynamics 365 offers. 

[#5]

@LicensingConcierge1 

That announcement must be what is causing the chatter.
I am new to this platform, how do you mark an answer accepted?

[#6]

@Steven_Leach 

What legacy licenses were purchased under CSP?

Regards,

Microsoft CSP Licensing Concierge

[#7]

Various 365 SKUs such as 365 business and enterprise SKUs.

[#8]

@Steve_Leach1 ...click on the 3 ellipses in the upper right corner of each reply that you wish to mark as an answer:

If this (or someone else's) reply answers your question, please Accept as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly. Otherwise, please let me know if you need further assistance on this topic.

Regards,

Microsoft CSP Licensing Concierge

[#9]

Hi @Steve_Leach1 

Important new Partner Center announcement that confirms deprecation of legacy licenses from July 2023.

June 2023 announcements - Partner Center announcements | Microsoft Learn

In the announcement it states, "Partners that already have customer subscriptions for these deprecated offers aren't impacted and can keep those subscriptions until the end of their terms." which I understand to mean at next renewal after 1st July 2023, customers would need to migrate subscriptions to NCE.

@LicensingConcierge1 do I understand this correctly?

A question to Microsoft is, how do customers know or have some kind of insight about this before partners?

[#10]

Hi @Nick_Beacroft ,

that's just how I understand this.

@LicensingConcierge1 
Can you please check here if this is really so?

[#11]

I second (or third) this.

I'm pretty sure the real penalty right now for partners is that you won't/aren't receiving any back-end incentives for keeping customers on legacy right now. That means you can still help your customers but you're not helping your bottom line.

[#12]

I'm having a hard time understanding the wording of this, compared to last year's announcement which clearly stated that legacy subscriptions would not auto renew and needed to be migrated to NCE.

Also, this recent announcement states:

"Partners can identify the respective New Commerce product SKUs for each of the legacy offers migrate to the NCE Mapping tab in the legacy Offer List Matrix. Partners can view deprecated offers in the legacy license-based price list as DEPR (deprecated). These recent deprecated offers will have the Valid-From Date value as 20230701 in the price list."

But looking at the current July pricelist, I do not see any DEPR offers with the Valid-from-Date 20230701. Does this mean that this won't apply to DEPR offers with an older Valid-From Date?

[#13]

I am expecting this will be clearer once the new July legacy price list is published.
I agree the wording could be much clearer that these must be transitioned to NCE upon renewal.
I'm also hoping Microsoft set these to expire in Partner Center.

[#14]

Hi @JillArmour ,

could you help us here that this is clearly explained?
Whether the legacy licenses at term end will no longer be automatically renewed and need to be migrated to NCE or will they continue to be renewed?

[#15]

@Claudio Stallone I don't know about this, but I will inquire within and post when I get a confirmed response. Stand by!! :)

[#16]

@JillArmour 

What I am hoping is that Microsoft are finally pushing the migration to NCE.
Yes, we've moved the majority of our customers, but our sales team has been reluctant to drive the message, and customers reluctant to migrate due to the less flexible nature of NCE.
Subsequently we now have some customers with a mix of legacy renewing SKU's and NCE SKU's when they needed something new.

Please make this a positive move Microsoft

Adding too, that on a recent partner Q&A session there was no clear answers, and lots of partner chat afterwards with different opinions of what the communication means.

[#17]

Hi @Claudio Stallone , @JillArmour 

As a friendly reminder, a subscription term is whatever was chosen when at the time of purchase. 

If the customer selected a 3yr subscription, then the term ends after 3yrs, at which point they're unable to further renew because the term has expired.

If the customer is in their 1st or 2nd year of a 3yr term, they're eligible to renew until the term ends.

The announcement supports this as it states:

Note: Microsoft encourages cloud migration, so feel free to migrate before the end of the term and utilize one of the applicable promotions listed in the Global Promo Readiness Guide, or on the Offer Matrix. 

If this (or someone else's) reply answers your question, please Accept as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly. Otherwise, please let me know if you need further assistance on this topic.

Regards,

Microsoft CSP Licensing Concierge

[#18]

I would ask that you reach out to the Seat Based NCE Program Group to confirm your interpretation of this blog post. This blog post has created a great deal of questions that have been posted to the NCE Seat Based Technical Preview and Q&A group. In response to these questions, a Microsoft employee, Brent Serbus provided the following response:

Brent Serbus can you confirm customers will be able to still renew in legacy? and can customers still add more licenses to their legacy subscriptions? Thanks!

[Yesterday 1:59 PM] Brent Serbus

Yes, as with the other 200 or so DEPR offers, there is not change to auto-renewal.

[Yesterday 2:00 PM] Brent Serbus

This is only about "new subscriptions", which, at this point, if "Commercial" should all be on/going to 'new commerce' for new sku acquisitions.

Thank you.

[#19]

With the new announcement, it becomes clearer what Microsoft has planned:

Next steps in CSP new commerce: Commercial legacy seat-based subscription migration and introduction of public sector offers
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/announcements/2023-july#6

[#20]

Yes!
I noted the announcement today too. From my perspective this is good news.