New and Updated Features
CSP Office 365 and Azure performance improvements
The entire Microsoft CSP service has been rewritten to improve performance.
- All code has been reviewed and improved.
- The service has been sliced into smaller micro-services for quicker response times.
- Separate synchronization applications have been written and implemented to cache Microsoft subscription and billing data locally to circumnavigate the slow API interfaces from Microsoft.
- A new caching solution has been implemented to improve each call made against Microsoft APIs.
- A Paging solution has been implemented to reduce time to load large sets of data.
Microsoft Azure Billing Report Update
We have completed a significant update to the Microsoft Azure billing report. The chart at the top of the page has been rebuilt. It will now show a summary of the total billing cost for the last 5 months. A new button has been placed below the chart to allow the user to load chart data for “This month so far” and “Forecast this month.” This requires Cloudmore to send requests to Microsoft for real-time data and may take some while to complete.
We have added 3 report options that should make it easier for the user to retrieve the relevant data. The 3 options are:
Invoice Data (Recommended report)
This is the recommended billing report to use to reconcile your Microsoft invoice.
This option will list all available invoices which are shown with invoice date and Microsoft invoice number. You can select one or more invoices.
If you have linked all your tenants and added the Azure service to all your customers, in Cloudmore, this report will reconcile with the Microsoft invoice.
Custom Billing Period
The Custom Billing Period allows you to select any date range and will display usage, cost and sales price for each customer.
If you select the same date range as the Microsoft invoice, the data on this report may not reconcile with the invoice because Microsoft’s billing period may be different from the usage period.
Ongoing Period
The ongoing period option will display usage, cost and sales price for each customer during the current billing period. As above, the data may also be different to the final invoice data.
Refresh Microsoft O365 CSP subscriptions button
The principal issue we have had with Microsoft O365 CSP performance has been the slow API interfaces provided by Microsoft. As a workaround, Cloudmore has implemented a caching solution that caches CSP data through an automated job that runs every night. We have also implemented a refresh button that allows a user to force an immediate refresh of the cached data. Keep in mind that this procedure may be slow if many records are being fetched.
Microsoft Azure CSP customer number included in billing exports
The Microsoft customer number is now included in the billing report exports.
Resource Group and Resource Name was added to Microsoft Azure CP billing exports
Azure Resource Name and Azure Resource Group Name have been added to the Azure Invoice and Ongoing period reports exports.
Key Account Managers Role with a restricted set of customers
The Key Account Manager role is intended for sales, account management, and support staff that are responsible for a subset of customers and should have full visibility and manageability of those customers. The Key Account Manager role will not have access to broker level settings such as price lists, custom services, and marketplace. But will have full access at the Organization level and can, for instance, set the sales prices for an Organization that they have permission to manage.
The Key Account Manager role works together with the Organization group functionality. This functionality enables an Administrator to create unlimited groups of Organizations. An Organization can be a member of multiple groups. When the Key Account Manager role is created, one or more Organizational groups, which the Key Account manager should have access to, are selected. If an Organization is added to an existing group, it will become visible by the Key Account Users who have access to that group. Once you have added an Organization group to a user, access can be managed from the Organization group page.
To create a Key Account Manager role you need to create or edit a Cloudmore user, select “Key Account Manager” from the role dropdown. Once saved, a new action button will appear which will open up a popup modal that allows you to select one or multiple Organization groups.
New payment frequencies for Custom Services
When setting up products for a custom service you configure both subscription period and payment frequency. We now have values for payment frequency of 3, 6, 12, 24 or 36 months.
Service Provider Branded Login Page update
To improve the look of the login page for white label customers, the top bar now stretches the entire page with the chosen logo background color.
New My Services view
A new 'My Services' view has been created for Service Providers with more than 10 services. The view has a filter, and each service will be displayed with name and the number of active organizations. For Service Providers with 10 or less services, the existing 'fast access' menu is retained.
Organization import update
The Organization import feature has been updated to allow all properties to be set through the import Organization feature. The Template files have been updated to reflect the new fields can be imported.
Renew Subscription Information
When renewing a subscription for a custom service the popup modal has been updated. The popup modal now contains more details in relation to the subscription and enables a user to change quantity and see the new cost before renewing.
Seller service publishing
For sellers, we have implemented a new procedure for publishing a service to the marketplace. With this new procedure, all newly created services will have a status of draft. The draft status allows a seller to edit service information and setup service plans, products, add-ons, and marketing materials. When ready, the seller will go to the Publish page, where the target market is selected. All new services will need to be approved by Cloudmore before they are visible in the marketplace.
Select currency for dashboard
As part of the currency support implemented in the release 2.32, the dashboard widgets show values in the selected default currency. In this release, we have added an option where the default currency can be overridden to display values the widgets in the desired currency instead. The new dashboard currency setting can be found by clicking on the profile in the top right corner and select Settings.
Localized price formatting
As different languages have different formatting regarding number separators and thousands separator, the platform now uses the language settings of the browser to display prices in the local format. This ensures that users see prices/numbers with "." and "," in the right places.
Language support update
A major development task to update the language support of the platform has been completed. This will make saving texts for custom services quicker and will increase the entire performance of the platform.
Performance improvements
In this release, we have implemented performance improvements for the following pages: Quote Tool, Service Overview, and Price List. Platform performance continues to be in focus over the coming period.
Bug fixes
- 11337 – Microsoft O365 CSP – Linking tenants sets wrong currency code
- 11395 – Microsoft O365 CSP – Cannot update addon price
- 11397 – Microsoft O365 CSP – Error adding subscription as organization with approval process turned on
- 11417 – Microsoft O365 CSP – Missing monthly/annual identifier in billing export
- 11688 – Microsoft O365 & Azure CSP – Dashboard data in widgets are wrong
- 11633 – Microsoft O365 CSP – Problems with filter not working in linking tenant page
- 11675 – Microsoft O365 CSP – Some data for some customers does not come through when linking tenants
- 11631 – Microsoft Azure CSP – Error message when running custom period billing report for some customers
- 11430 – Custom Service - Fixes to renewal options
- 11637 – Custom Services - Wrong Payment Frequency displayed when select a service plan for a subscription
- 11398 – Quote Tool – Incorrect pricing for seller services
- 11461 – Limit the Feedback feature to only allow images to be uploaded
- 11476 – Submitting multiple Feedbacks with attachments causes link to attachments to be wrong
- 11498 – Organization Dashboard – Billing data displays before the Billing Start Date
- 11394 – Changing quantity of a subscription unchecks addons
- 11280 – Login page user interface error on Android-based tablets
- 11713 – Requesting access to Cloudmore did not send invite email under some circumstances
Known issues
- 12089 - Swedish language settings make dates go to Invalid Format
If your browser is set to Swedish language and you use the data picker on report pages and you select Custom Range, the dates may say Invalid date. Selecting a date from the picker should fix it. Otherwise you need to change the browser language to English.
- Microsoft O365 CSP User Page is slow and unresponsive with a large number of users.