Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) is a one stop program for Microsoft partners to sell all Microsoft online commercial services to their customers. While CSP partners can purchase O365, Azure and other commercial services for their customers from Microsoft today, they can’t purchase Visual Studio subscriptions, team services users and many first party extensions for team services that are sold through Visual Studio market place. In this blog, I will share the details on how we will allow CSP partners to purchase from Visual Studio marketplace for their customers as well as provision new team services account for their customers through the Azure Portal. This will be available in 2017 Q3.

As always, the timelines and designs are subject to change.

Purchase from Visual Studio Marketplace

All CSP partners have access to Microsoft partner center to sign up new customers and purchase several online services from the catalog of services available. Partners can select and setup an Azure usage based subscription from the catalog or use an existing one that they have already setup for their customers to purchase from Visual Studio market place. There will be a link in the partner center to navigate to Visual Studio market place. Partners can purchase the following services from Visual Studio market place for their customers

• Visual Studio professional monthly/annual subscriptions
• Visual Studio enterprise monthly/annual subscriptions
• HockeyApp business plans
• Xamarin University
• Team services users (if you need to expand your team beyond the 5 free users included with each team services account)
• Private and hosted pipelines
• Other 1st party team services extensions like ‘Test Manager’

CSP partners can navigate to Visual Studio Marketplace from partner center to purchase on behalf of their customers. However, if they come directly to Visual Studio Marketplace, they won’t be able to purchase for their customers but only for themselves. Partners can also navigate to the visual studio subscriptions management portal to assign the Visual Studio subscriptions they have purchased to the users in the customer directory. There will be links from the Visual Studio subscription purchase workflow as well as from the partner center for the subscriptions management portal.

Setting up new team services accounts from Azure

CSP partners can now navigate to Azure portal from partner center and from there they can setup new team services accounts for their customers. The account they setup will be linked to the customer’s Azure Active Directory as well as to the Azure CSP subscription that the CSP manages. However, the partners can’t neither administer team services accounts on behalf of the customers nor have access to the team services accounts that they setup for their customers. We have this scenario in our backlog and we hope to support this in the future.

Moving between customer owned and partner owned Azure subscriptions

Customers with existing team service accounts can transfer them from a customer owned Azure subscription to a partner managed Azure CSP subscription. They can go to the Azure portal and unlink their team services accounts from their current Azure subscriptions and request the CSP partner to link these accounts to an Azure CSP subscription setup for the customer but managed by the partner. In the same way if a customer terminates the partnership with a CSP partner, they can ask the CSP partner to unlink their team services accounts from the Azure CSP subscription and after that they can go ahead and link it to a customer owned Azure subscription (e.g. Azure Pay-as-you-go). Customers and CSP partners can plan the subscription changes to avoid disruptions to their service. In the long term, Azure team has and working on a plan to seamlessly transfer the assets owned by a customer owned subscription to a partner managed subscription.

Thanks, Rajesh Ramamurthy Senior Program Manager (Visual Studio Team Services)