Preview and subscribe to a SaaS offer in the commercial marketplace
This article explains how to use Partner Center to submit your SaaS offer for publishing, preview your offer, and subscribe to a plan. You must have already created an offer that you want to publish. For information about the overall process to test a SaaS, see Test a SaaS plan overview.
Note
We recommend that you create a separate test and development (DEV) offer as a low-risk way to test before you publish your production (PROD) offer. Follow these steps to create and test the DEV offer before you publish your (PROD) offer.
Submit your offer for publishing
Sign in to Partner Center.
On the Home page, select the Marketplace offers tile.
Make sure that the Status column for each page says Complete. The three possible statuses are as follows:
- Not started – The page is incomplete.
- Incomplete – The page is missing required information or has errors that need to be fixed. You'll need to go back to the page and update it.
- Complete – The page is complete. All required data has been provided and there are no errors.
If any of the pages have a status other than Complete, select the page name, correct the issue, save the page, and then select Review and publish again to return to this page.
After all the pages are complete, in the Notes for certification box, provide testing instructions to the certification team to ensure that your app is tested correctly. Provide any supplementary notes helpful for understanding your app.
To start the publishing process for your offer, select Publish. The Offer overview page appears and shows the offer's Publish status.
Your offer's publish status changes as it moves through the publication process. For detailed information on this process, see Validation and publishing steps.
Preview and subscribe to your offer
When the offer is ready for your test in the preview environment, we send you an email to request that you review and approve your offer preview. You can also refresh the Offer overview page in your browser to see if your offer has reached the Publisher sign-off phase. If it has, the Go live button and preview links will be available. There will be a link for either Microsoft AppSource preview, Azure Marketplace preview, Azure portal, or a combination of them depending on the options you chose when creating your offer. If you chose to sell your offer through Microsoft, anyone who has been added to the preview audience can test the acquisition and deployment of your offer to ensure it meets your requirements during this stage.
The following screenshot shows the Offer overview page for a SaaS offer, with two preview links under the Go live button. The validation steps you see on this page vary depending on the selections you made when you created the offer.
The publisher payout occurs when the criteria are met and will be paid out per the payout schedule with the agency fee deducted from the purchase price.
If your offer is a Contact Me listing, test that a lead is created as expected by providing the Contact Me details during preview.
Use the following steps to preview your offer.
- Sign in to Azure portal. Make sure you're signed in to the Azure tenant you submitted the offer to.
- In Partner Center, go to the Offer overview page, and then select the Azure portal preview link under the Go live button.
Subscribe to a test plan
In Azure portal, on the offer subscribe page of your test offer from the Plan list, select the test plan you created earlier.
Select the Subscribe button.
Under Project details, from the Subscription list, select the SaaS test environment subscription.
Select an existing Resource Group or select Create new to create a new one.
Under SaaS details, enter a Name for the SaaS instance.
Leave Recurring billing set to On.
Select the Review + subscribe button.
The Review + subscribe page appears to finalize the subscription process.
Near the bottom of the page, select Subscribe. The Deployment progress screen appears.
Once the subscription is deployed, the Your SaaS subscription is Complete message appears.
Activate a subscription
As a publisher, you'll be notified that you have a pending subscription. You can use the SaaS fulfillment APIs to activate the subscription.
Install or use a tool that can send HTTP requests to test your solution, for example:
Visual Studio Code with an extension from Visual Studio Marketplace
-
Caution
For scenarios where you have sensitive data, such as credentials, secrets, access tokens, API keys, and other similar information, make sure to use a tool that protects your data with the necessary security features, works offline or locally, doesn't sync your data to the cloud, and doesn't require that you sign in to an online account. This way, you reduce the risk around exposing sensitive data to the public.
Once someone subscribes to your offer, you'll be notified of a new subscription.
Using the tool, you can post against the Activate a subscription API to activate the pending subscription by providing the
planId.
Once activation is successful, you'll receive status code 202 Accepted.
