Microsoft Warns Partners Of September API Migration Deadline

The “very low adoption rate” is “really alarming,” Microsoft program manager Sourish Deb said in a call with partners.

Microsoft is warning partners to update their code for new application programming interface by Sept. 30 to avoid service disruption – with a Microsoft representative revealing on a recent call with solution providers that less than 20 percent of partners have made the migration.

Microsoft program manager Sourish Deb told solution providers on the August Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) technical training call that the “very low adoption rate” is “really alarming” because not moving to the new API could cause interruptions for billing reconciliation.

“If you want uninterrupted service by then, then you need to migrate to V2 APIs,” Deb said on the call, reviewed by CRN. “That's why I'm just stressing on this point and bringing up this topic again and again to remind you to migrate to newer APIs. And if you face any challenges, any issues, bring them to our attention so that we can get back to you and fix that. … It is really very elementary.”

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Microsoft Partner Center Change

CRN has reached out to Microsoft and Deb for comment.

Christopher Regan, managing partner of B&R Solutions, told CRN in an interview that the Spring Lake, N.J.-based Microsoft partner uses a third-party CSP management offering – CSP Control Center – to avoid dedicating manpower to keeping up with Partner Center API changes after Microsoft introduced its controversial new commerce experience (NCE) platform.

“Prior to the introduction of the New Commerce Experience, we had built our own custom Microsoft Teams application in-house for CSP management,” Regan said. “But once NCE came along, we decided that it no longer made sense to try and keep up with all of the API changes that were introduced then and continue to be made, as it would have taken one of our developers a good portion of their time to stay on top of everything, and it just wasn't worth the effort.”

The new asynchronous API for billing reconciliation was released in March and has faster download times and reduces latency, especially with large data volumes, according to Microsoft.

The four APIs set to retire in September as part of this change are:

• “Get invoice line items API”
• “Invoicing and reconciliation v2 API (beta)”
• “Get invoice billed commercial consumption line items”
• “Get invoice unbilled commercial consumption line items”

Improvements with the new API include no longer needing a connection open for hours or looping through millions of transactions in batches of 2,000 at a time, according to the tech giant.

Asynchronous API uses valet key and asynchronous request-reply patterns, and it provides a shared access signature (SAS) token that partners can leverage for accessing all attributes or a subset of billed invoice reconciliation data, according to Microsoft.

The new API is only available for Microsoft Graph public and global cloud for now. The API isn’t available yet for Azure Government, Azure Germany, or Azure China 21Vianet.