
With the General Availability (GA) of Microsoft New Commerce Experience just a few months away, Work 365 has already released features to its product for customers to tackle the changes warranted by NCE. Read more about these new features and benefits for your Microsoft cloud business.
Work 365 until now
Work 365 is a subscription management and billing automation application that helps streamline processes around recurring and subscription-based revenue. Built on Dynamics 365 as a native application, users can leverage all of the Dynamics Sales capabilities, including Sales and Service Management and the capabilities of the Power Platform, including PowerApps, Power BI, and Power Automate to accomplish even more.
Work 365 also supports multi-currency and multi-location requirements – generating invoices in 7 different languages. Focusing on 4 major application areas, Provisioning and Subscriptions, Billing and Invoicing, Self-service and Payments, this cloud billing automation platform is the perfect integrated billing solution for CSPs, MSPs, and ISVs.
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Introducing a cluster of new features
With the NCE launch date fast approaching, Work 365 has recently introduced a bunch of new features around Azure, Product Service, Self-Service, and Report Scheduler. Let’s look at each one of them in detail:
01
Advanced Azure
Although Azure billing has been an integral part of Work 365 for a while now, new updates provide greater flexibility and control for Azure billing. With the Advanced Azure feature, end users can better understand their Azure invoices, reconcile consumption data and see a breakdown of their consumption as against a singular total on their invoice.
For partners who are scaling their Azure business, Advanced Azure helps mitigate risks and minimize performance issues because of large amounts of consumption data. New capabilities include grouping consumption data based on tags and resources, new configuration settings to specify the date used in Azure invoice line description, daily usage syncing, as well as additional threshold alerts on consumption usage.
02
Product Service
Product Service enables advanced automation capabilities for partners in the CSP program to manage the CSP product catalog, especially as Microsoft publishes new pricing and terms. By streamlining the management of the CSP product catalog, Product Service enables partners to be informed of new price updates from Microsoft, the retirement of certain SKUs, manage exposure, and accordingly update the pricing of the product directly in the catalog.
To take this experience to the next level, new updates to the Product Service will enable partners to design their products and services, push bulk pricing updates (cost and sales) to the CRM product catalog as well as push bulk price updates to existing subscriptions.
03
Self-Service Portal
Work 365’s Self-Service portal has been enabling end-users to manage their subscriptions, view invoice history, track Azure usage and assign licenses. New updates enhance the utility of the portal, giving customers more control over their licensing needs. With the NCE changes coming up, these new updates will provide additional guardrails for partners: from support for non-recurring items on the portal to offering users the ability to schedule quantity changes for subscriptions as well as control the direction in which subscription changes are made.
04
Report Scheduler
Report Scheduler is a brand-new feature that has been introduced in Work 365 core application, to provide better visibility with subscription provisioning especially with the rollout of the NCE. With this new feature, users will be able to send scheduled emails alerts, daily reports, and custom changes across the organization from within the Work 365 application. Report Scheduler will pave the way for the finance, sales, and operations team to track daily transactional changes, mitigate pending actions, and organize schedule invoicing processes.
Using this feature, teams can accomplish several tasks like they can create views in CRM (across any entities) and get them delivered to their mailbox, group, and sort columns, as well as generate reports and get custom views across metrics such as invoices created, payments processed, or licenses provisioned on a particular day or time interval.
The road ahead
As CSPs and MSPs struggle to overcome the billing and invoicing challenges of their subscription-based businesses, Work 365’s billing automation and subscription management solution is a great way to scale recurring revenue, boost customer engagement, and unlock opportunities from sales to service.
With the New Commerce Experience soon coming into play, updates to the Work 365 application are sure to make the end-user experience even more frictionless and gratifying. At the same time, with other enhancements like ConnectWise Integration and Work 365 API in tow, there is enough reason for partners to explore and adopt Work 365 to streamline their recurring business while making the most of the NCE.
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