Navigating MS Partner Centre

With all the changes to the MS Partner Program and the impending GDAP changes, managing your Partner Centre Account and checking the ‘state of the nation’ is probably required more than before. 

When you log into your MS Partner Centre today, you should see a similar view to the screen shot below.

Your view could have more, or less Workspaces depending on your permissions.

But at a minimum you should be seeing Customers and Insights, if Customers is missing, you haven’t signed up for CSP, or you don’t have the correct permissions to manage customers in Partner Centre.

Here’s a list of all the different workspaces available:
(do be aware that access to the different workspaces are dependent on the partnership with Microsoft, what programs you are signed up to and the access your have within your companies MS Partner Centre account)

You can see that you need the Membership Workspace to check your MS Partner Network membership and competencies.  If you click on this Workspace on the landing page, you can see your progress for the different Partner Designations, this includes a clear indication of the points you’ve gained towards each one, with a score out of 100 displayed.  You need a minimum score of 70 to obtain a Partner Designation and then receive MS Incentives and Benefits.

You click on the information links within each Partner Designation, these will give you information and guidance on how to obtain more points.

There have been numerous different blogs and articles to help our partners with this over the last several months, but the best and most current guidance will always be from Microsoft, within the Partner Network pages online

All the information in this article can be found here:  What is Partner Center? - Partner Center | Microsoft Docs

Partner Centre is where you should be managing your customers even if you aren’t a Microsoft Silver or Gold Partner or have a new Partner Designation.  This way you maintain control on your staff’s access to your customers tenants and engineers don’t need to manage Global Admin accounts.

 
This is all managed through the Customers workspace, if you have signed up to provide CSP licensing to your customers, you should see this workspace.  By clicking on this, you should see a list of all your customers.  If you click on a customer, you can manage the tenant through here, reset passwords to user’s accounts and have access to the Admin Centre and different portals for configuration.

There could be a number of reasons that you could be missing customers from here, the most common being that the customer association link hasn’t been processed to add your company under the Customer Relationships of this tenant.  If you do this, it will add the customer to the list and you can then manage them via Partner Centre.
Please be aware that Microsoft does expect all partners/resellers to be managing their customer base via their Partner Centre account and not using customers global admin accounts, purely based on security reasons.  

Once you have all your customers accounts running through Partner Centre, this is when you can start using Insights and the reporting you can get from your customer base can really start to help you make decisions going forward, who to target for campaigns or just give you an overview of where you’re at.
Recognising MS Partner Centre as a tool and not just something you have to do, is the first step to making it work for you rather than the other way around.