Important advisory on purchasing Office 365 via the Microsoft Online Portal

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Earlier this year, we announced additional ways to sell and buy commercial SKUs of Office 365 in Australia, including the introduction of Open licensing, at Retail via ESD and availability through the Microsoft Online Portal from 02 April 2014. 

It’s with regret that we are informing our customers and partners today that there will be a delay to availability via the Microsoft Online Portal. Open Licensing through distribution and Electronic Software Delivery availability is unaffected by this announcement, in addition to ongoing availability from Telstra via T-Suite.

Customer and partner experience is critically important to us. We want the online purchasing experience, via the Portal, to be a great one and we are not currently satisfied that this is the case. We have more work to do and will not be making the Portal available until we are satisfied that the purchasing experience is a seamless and smooth one.

We’re working hard to get the Portal up and running, and will have more to share in coming weeks on the status of our progress and a new timeframe for availability. 

The last thing we want to do is disappoint our customers and partners and I want to assure you that we have not taken this step lightly. I realise there is the potential for business impact from the delay and I want to apologise for any disruption we have caused. 

We understand that you may have additional questions and have taken the step of setting up a dedicated support line on 1800 111 000.   You can also email us on officeau@microsoft.com 

I will also be running Q&A sessions each day from 12-1pm from Monday 31st March through to Friday 4th April where partners are welcome to ask questions.  Please dial into the sessions via this link: https://join.microsoft.com/meet/mmarkham/25QH63DC.  Alternatively you can dial in via phone on +61298702923 and the conference ID will be 6034120907.

You can also stay up to date by joining the Cloud Champion community. https://blogs.msdn.com/b/auspartners/archive/2014/02/23/cloud-contenders-are-you-ready.aspx

Steven Miller, Microsoft Office Division Lead, Microsoft Australia