Coterminosity with NCE

Microsoft has recently announced (opens in new tab) functionality called Coterminosity into the New Commerce Experience, effective 3/18/22. This is pretty big news for MSPs as it greatly reduces operational complexity at a per customer level. In this article, I will be breaking apart what this means for you from a billing and management perspective.

Before Coterminosity#

Before this policy was instituted, subscription renewals were looking like they were going to be a nightmare. Essentially, you had a disparate renewal date on a per subscription basis depending on when you upgraded legacy products into NCE or ordered NCE net new. This means that potentially, you could have many different renewal dates on a per customer level.

This obviously is not optimal, especially when we talk about add-ons having a different renewal date than base plans. Managing these renewals and accommodating for this in PSA tools was going to be extremely complex.

New Updates#

Coterminosity allows you to align all of the subscriptions under a customer to a single renewal date, no matter the term. The following example will give more clarity:

Key Takeaways:

• Charges are prorated accordingly based off the first subscription renewal. i.e. Subscription B above is prorated from July 17 to May 2.
• You can have more than one coterminous date for customer’s subscriptions if you wanted to mix this up (don’t know why you would but it is available)
• Co-termination applies to both add-ons and base products
• More granular details can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/align-subscription-end-dates (opens in new tab)

Unsupported Scenarios#

Coterminosity will not support the following scenarios:

• Add a seat to an existing subscription (meaning you cannot reset your renewal when you increment seats)
• Upgrading a seat to a new or existing subscription
• Mid-term adjustments of subscription durations (meaning if you moved to 1 year to 3 year for instance)
• Adjustment of subscription end dates after Coterminosity is turned on
• Having the same end dates across customer tenants

How to start using Coterminosity#

CSP1 => Leverage the partner center documentation referenced above to start using APIs or the user interface to select Co-terminus dates.

Indirect Resellers => If you are working with a distributor, its possible they do not support this functionality just yet. When they do, active NCE subscriptions cannot be retroactively set to be co-terminus. All net new subscription would be eligible once the functionality is added. Its likely the distributor will perform the opting in of co-terms on the backend or they will give you a selection to do so on the front-end when purchasing the subscription.