It seems pretty simple, but we still have a number of partners getting tripped up with this step and how to best manage new customers that they are onboarding for CSP Licensing management.

 

When you obtain a new tenant or creating a new tenant to your account within Dicker Data CSP Portal, enter your own email address, or an email address you will have access to. This email address is where Global Admin credentials are sent for new tenants, and if they are an existing tenant, the association URL will be sent to the email address.

With an existing tenant, you will entre the Tenant Domain and the Company ID will Auto Populate, the email address entered will be sent an email that will invite the receiver to process the association URL to accept Dicker Data as the provider of CSP Licensing within their tenant. In many cases this has already been processed by the new partner so will only confuse the end user if required.

 

There is an important step to take here, whether you have added an existing tenant or created a new one, you need to ensure that your own Company Association has been processed against the customer’s tenant. Your company should be listed under the tenants Partner Relationship along with Dicker Data’s and in many cases, other partnerships will also be detailed.

If your company is not listed in the tenants Partner Relationships, your company will not receive any recognition from Microsoft for the licenses, this is important for all partners, even if you don’t qualify for a Partner Designation under the new Partner program. You can create your own Customer Association URL from your own Partner Centre Account or request one from Dicker Data.

Email: Microsoft.sales@dickerdata.co.nz

The biggest benefit for Partners to add their company under the Partner Relationships, is the ability to reset the users’ passwords. I believe that the next step, before adding any licenses, to onboarding a new customer, should be processing the URL and checking to ensure your company is detailed, as it’s then easy to sort out any issues going forward should there be a typo in the email address or if anything funky happens, you then have some access to the tenant.

Learn how to create your own Customer Association URL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/connect-with-your-customers#invite-an-existing-customer-to-establish-a-reseller-relationship-with-you

To invite a customer to a reseller relationship, use the following steps:

  1. Sign into Partner Center and select Customers.
  2. Select a customer from the Customer list and then select Request a reseller relationship.
  3. On the next page, review the draft email message.
  4. You can open the draft message in email, or you can copy the message to your clipboard and paste it into an email message.
  5. You can edit the draft email message but be sure to include the URL because it's personalized to link the customer directly to your account.
  6. Select Done.
  7. Send the email to your customer. Partners can process this on behalf of their customer if they wish too.
  8. After your customer accepts your invitation, they appear on your customer’s page. You can then manage their subscriptions and service from there.
  9. To manage the customer's account, services, users, and licenses, select the customer's record and then select what you want to do.

If you are using the URL below to associate customers to Dicker Data, please note this URL does not include your company and you will have to follow the above process for the customer to be listed under customers - https://dickerdata.co.nz/dd.

 

If you create a new tenant and use the incorrect email address, there is no way to retrieve the Global Admin Credentials. Due to Zero Trust policies, Dicker Data can’t reset passwords and MS Support won’t either, the alternative is to create a new tenant for the customer and let the first one go. This is such a painful experience when this happens.

 

After taking over existing tenants, remember to do some general housekeeping and remove any admin access still in place with incumbent relationships. Do check first as the end customer could have legitimate services from a different partner that needs access to the tenant, for example Dynamics or Power BI specialists, Azure specialist services etc.