FPC Program Ideas/Suggestions

Requesting early access to the tools and reporting within Partner Center as FTOP makes the transition to Partner Center. Looking to be apart of a pilot, leveraging the portal before any go live dates.

Background: After watching the FRP Community segment on FY22 Partner Center and other tool changes and bringing AI to help evaluate OSU/Partner of Record claims faster, I wanted to suggest an alternative approach. My assumption is that it would be possible to have passive approvals for what I also assume are the majority of claims by changing the process. AI could still be used for what remains.
 
To truly streamline, having a hosted "request website" at Microsoft would be best as the OSU claims team would significantly reduce the need to manually evaluate claim forms. This saves whatever global quantity of FRPs there are from maintaining similar, but separate processes. The Microsoft program can pre-approve each FRP SOW for standard items at the beginning of the annual program period and implement required changes, like the public sector requirements on the fly or with minimal intervention. The team handling the claims approval would then have more time to process those with custom SOWs, that may include special offers or value-added services.
 
The customer and partner experience would improve significantly. Some customers have adversity to a document-based form that is routed via email versus a webform. There would be better reporting for all parties involved in the process.  Lost claims forms situations should go to zero. Target dates could be captured from the customer, when submitting the request. The partners would have better visibility to the status of claims and reduce manual input as well. The "chain of custody" problem with some claims would be eliminated. With some common sense guidelines determined programmatically, there could be a reduction of erroneous disassociations, which will reduce disputes. When disputes arise, more specific data in a single repository would exist, thus streamlining the ability to respond appropriately and more timely. There is potential that this process could also support short-term or specific programs like we saw with Edge or Teams Rooms. The limitations about the number of claims submitted could either be identified upon submission or be eliminated.
 
The workflow I envision is as follows (with my knowledge of the process):

1. The FRP provides the customer one of 2 ways to engage with the claims/partner of record process:
   1. The customer could receive a custom URL for a specific FRP
   2. The FRP would have a code to provide to the customer, that identifies the specific FRP
   3. For custom SOWs, the FRP could pre-enter much of the data and upload the SOW that is outside of the preapproved items for that FRP. Then a custom URL for that document could be provided to the customer and they would login and approve.
2. When the customer logs in, they complete the necessary fields. There may need to be an interim step as a Tenant Administrator (or even the FRP) may need to complete some fields and then save it as a draft or send it onto the designated approver at the organization.
   1. Want: The page could have both logos so it is visible this is a Microsoft program, delivered by a Partner
   2. Want: The customer could define the appropriate contact for surveys, indicating a single POC for all services or individual for each
3. The completed webform routes a notification as it moves to the FRP-confirmation stage, to the FRP for confirmation and once they confirm, it goes for approval to the OSU claims team
   1. The FRP should have the right to send it back to the customer for corrections
4. With a preapproved SOW list, any services at this stage that are defined as "standard" for the FRP, would have a passive approval, if no existing claims exist.
   1. Want: Process improvement to reduce erroneous partner dissociations.
      1. When a customer logs in for approval in step 2, they would see what is claimed by which FRPs and if they are below a certain percentage with no growth over a certain time period (TBD), they would be eligible to change.
      2. If they don't meet that criteria, there can be an exception form the FRP can walk through with the customer to determine if disassociation would be appropriate.
5. It is likely a significant portion of these would be auto-approved at this point, with confirmation emails sent to the Customer and Partner. Exceptions, customer SOWs, and disputes would become the majority of the work for the approval team as they can shift the volume out of their queue.
6. In the backend, this process could be linked to the Partner Center portal interface and simply loaded automatically at some interval, improving the speed of seeing the claims from the current process.

 
 

When submitting SOW/POE for CPOR association, customers sometimes feel uncomfortable to sign several SOW/POE with same contents with the only differences in the ticked workloads. Is it necessary to have the maximum of four workloads for per SOW/POE, any possibilities to remove this limit? 

All

So, as part of a green initiative and also to help get the programme running better, I was thinking that with a little code (possibly PowerApp), Microsoft could create an electronic version of the POE form and include e-signatures from the customer as part of the process flow.

At present, I know we have a form that is emailed to the customer, they complete it, ticking boxes and filling in information (this could all be lookup based), before either signing a printed and scanned version of the form, that we then upload back to you as our Proof.

So, create a powerApp, link it to your MPN, add a search facility (like Accelerator's) and create a simple click and slide option menu.  E-signature and automatic approval would speed up the whole process and make it simple, with NO disputes.

Options!?

Dear all,

Currently, We understand that there are collaterals (Emailers, Posters etc) for Azure AD Premium rollouts and Intune rollouts.

But, for Azure Information Protection - Required Customer Facing communication emailers, Posters, templates etc which is currently not available in the FastTrack Resource hub.

The new POE for has a lot of boxes to check. Some of the boxes seem to overlap each other. 
For example what is the difference in Remote Guidance and Customer support?
 

Hi All,

We are seeing a lot of customer where automatic enrolment of Intune devices via AD are increasing usage for the workload meaning we arent eligible for the incentive & the customer isn't actively using the workload.

Would there every be the opportunity for an incentive to be reinstated for a scenario like the below when a partner isnt eligible for the incentive on below but the customer clearly isnt using the workload at all?

Its frustrating for us as the customer its really needing support and it’s another one with no incentive for us!
 

In July, we experienced a large claw back of incentives due to an overpayment from Microsoft in May for the Microsoft Information Protection workload.  The reporting errors not only impact us financially, but it negatively effects our internal sales force's quota goals and confidence in the reporting structure of the OSU and FastTrack program.  This is not the first and only incident. A similar error has happened last year.

As lots workloads have officially changed the name to new workload name, could you please also change the names in Partner Center for them? Every time when we - partners are trying to submit CPOR association requests, or checking claim status in Partner Center, the old display names are really really confused. For example, Azure Advanced Threat Protection, which should be Microsoft Defender for Identity now, still using the old display name. This is confusing...

We'd like to flag or not have OSU start tracking the usage for entitlements that have less than 150 entitlements (requirement). For example, if a customer 1000 seat customer has 10 licenses of EMS E3 and they are testing Intune and they deploy the 10 entitlements, the usage will be 100% and we would NOT be eligible for any incentives when the usage is already at 100% and we submit a CPOR claim. This is common especially with CSP customers who do not want to invest in the cost of the entire license cost while they are testing.  It's challenging to track to watch when the customer will make the rest of the license purchase when you have hundreds of customers. Changing the tracking of customers with less than 150 entitlements will allow partners to assist customers with less than the 150 requirement with the intent to purchase more after testing is complete.