Value Incentive Plan (VIP) Reseller Console Walk-throughNovember 2016
Presenter
Presentation Notes
This short presentation is designed to acquaint you with the procedures and tools for utilizing the Reseller Console, the online tool for Adobe Authorized VIP Resellers to manage their VIP customer agreements and licenses, and their reseller users. You can also view these as notes with the icon in the top left in PDF form.
Within a week of becoming certified to sell VIP, your Reseller Organization Primary Admin will receive an email invitation to your Reseller Console. As the Reseller Organization Primary Admin, you should check your email for the Reseller Console invitation, pictured here. Once you receive this email, follow the steps to accept and gain access to the Reseller Console to begin selling VIP subscription licensing.
To gain access to the VIP Reseller Console, you must be the Reseller Admin or have received an invitation to be a Reseller team member in the Reseller Console. The first thing you will need to do once you have accepted your invitation is to log into the Reseller Console. You do this by going to reseller.adobe.com, here you will sign in with the Adobe ID you used to accept the invitation.
Once you have logged in your screen will look somewhat similar to the above. Your Reseller organization name should be identified. There are 3 options, Organization Details, Reseller Team, and Customers. Let’s take a look at Organization Details.
Second is Reseller Team. It’s likely that your first step will be to add Reseller team members, so that your organization’s users can invite and manage VIP customers. To do this, click on the “Reseller Team” option.
This will bring you to your list of team members. Here, you can manage users, including invitations and removals, as well as check on their invitation status. If you have a large number of team members, you may need to use the search function, the magnifying glass in the top right, to locate a specific user.
The first thing you will notice is that the primary administrator, James Kirk in this screenshot, will not have the “minus” symbol to the right. This user should match the Primary Admin as listed in the Organization Details. The Reseller Primary Admin can only be removed if they are replaced with a different user. To do this, contact your regional Adobe Partner Connection Helpdesk.
To add a user, click the “plus” in the top right. This will bring up a window to enter users. You can send an invitation to a single email address, or multiple email addresses by separating each email address with a comma. Once you’ve entered the email addresses to which you’d like to send an invitation, click “Send Invitation”. Those users will then be identified in the list as “Pending”.
In the case of a change of personnel, you may need to remove Reseller users from your account. Users can be removed whether “Pending” or “Active”, by clicking the “minus” to the right of their user details. A window will appear asking you to confirm the user removal.
In the “Customers” section, you’ll see there are multiple tabs for customer views. We’ll review those after we’ve covered how to manage your customers. From here, you’ll see a “plus” icon in the top right. This appears in every view tab, and is how you’ll invite a customer organization to VIP. On every view tab, you’ll see a “plus” icon in the top right, and this is how you’ll invite a customer organization to VIP.
After clicking the “plus”, a window will populate where you can input your customer’s information. Note that at the bottom of this window, there is also a check-box option to “Allow customer to select their anniversary date”. This is how you enable an extended term with up-front payments. For more information on this, check out the VIP Program Guide. Once your customer information has been entered, you can click “Invite customer”.
Once you have sent the invite to the customer, they will receive the invitation, which looks like this. They can click the link to “Join now”, which will bring them to the VIP Terms and Conditions, which they will then accept. Once they accept the terms and conditions, the customer will receive a welcome email which includes a link for them to access the Admin Console. Also after they have accepted the terms and conditions, they will appear as a customer in your Reseller Console.
Once you have customers who have accepted invitations, you can start authorizing VIP licenses and submitting orders to Adobe through LWS (Adobe Licensing Website). To manage your customers licenses, you can click on the carrot to the right of the customer line.
This will bring you to the “Customer Details” page. Here you can view your customer’s details, including VIP number, Primary Administrator, Anniversary Date, Market Segment, managing Reseller team member, etc. This is also where you’ll have the most comprehensive picture of their licensing details.
Licensing details will include the VIP Select level, and their 3-year commit participation. If you click “View Details” to the left of the Membership Status, you can find more in-depth information. For this customer, you can see that they have VIP Select Level 2, and are enrolled in 3-year commit. You can see their 3-year commit dates, as well as the number of licenses they’ve committed to. For more information on VIP Select and 3-year commit, see the partner-facing VIP How to Order Guide or the customer-facing VIP Program Guide, both available on AIG (adobeinteractiveguide.adobe.com).
Before diving into managing the customer’s licenses, let’s talk about the managing reseller user. The managing reseller user is the user who manages that specific customer, in terms of adding purchase authorizations, placing orders, and coordinating renewals. The reseller user who sends the customer invitation is the default managing reseller user for that customer. You have the ability to change the managing reseller user to another user in this page, as well. Next to “Managed by” in the “Customer Details” section, you’ll see the name of the managing reseller user. You, as the Administrator, can click “Change” next to this name to assign the customer to a different reseller user. This brings up a window with other reseller users. You select the user you would like to manage that customer, and confirm by clicking “Select”.
For Education customers looking to purchase device licenses, an order must be placed directly in LWS. We’ll cover what device licenses look like in the Reseller Console once they’re purchased soon. To access named-user licenses, your customers can add purchase authorizations through the Admin Console. A purchase authorization allows the customer to access licenses immediately, so they can begin inviting users to the products. Once a purchase authorization is created, the user will have 30 days to submit their payment to Adobe. Occasionally, the customer may request that you create a purchase authorization on their behalf. To do this, click “Create new purchase authorization”
A window will pop up where you can select the product type and license quantities, as well as an optional PO Number. We do highly recommend that a PO is used for both Purchase Authorizations in the console, and while placing the LWS order, to assist our system in reconciling orders with their intended purchase authorizations.
Once a purchase authorization has been created by either the customer or a Reseller team member, details will appear in the Customer Details page. First, a section for “Pending and Overdue Authorizations” will appear under the customer organization and membership details. This shows the quantity and types of licenses which have been authorized, but not yet paid. Under that, an overview of plans appears, listing all licenses and their status. Here you’ll see that there are a total of 10 pending licenses, 5 of which are Creative Cloud All Apps, and 5 of which are Acrobat Pro DC.
Customers who have purchased device licenses will also show those licenses under “Plans”, separately from named-user licenses. Note that the “Invited” column under device licenses shows as blank – this is because invitations are not sent for device licenses, instead they are installed directly on devices, and activated upon launching the first app on the device.
Under the “Plans” section, customers with enterprise products will show a separate section for enterprise licenses. Enterprise products, like device licenses, cannot be authorized in the console at this time; an order would need to be submitted through LWS. After orders are received by Adobe, those licenses are reflected in the Reseller Console.
Additionally, under those sections will be an “Order and Authorization History” which details all purchase authorizations and their status, including Pending, Fulfilled, Returned, and Suspended. This overview gives a quick look at the total quantity of licenses in that authorization, the duration of those licenses, the date they were authorized, and who authorized them. For customers who have purchased enterprise products, there will be an icon indicating the license type. Pending licenses are those which have been authorized, but are awaiting payment. Fulfilled means that the purchase authorization has been paid in full. Returned licenses are those which have had an RMA submitted to Adobe. Finally, Suspended licenses are those which were authorized, and for which payment was not submitted within 30 days. Here, you’ll notice that Pending purchase authorizations reflect an “X” at the right-hand side of the row. Pending purchase authorizations may be cancelled by the Reseller within the 30-day grace period, in the case that a purchase authorization was created with mistakes, or duplicate purchase authorizations were created by the customer and the Reseller. Partially paid purchase authorizations will still reflect “Pending” but will no longer have the ability to be removed.
Lastly, within this section, if you click the linked PO Number, additional details will appear. This includes the Authorization Date, the person who authorized the licenses, the duration of the licenses, and the product types and quantities. You’ll see that Device licenses are listed separately from named-user licenses, as are enterprise products.
Additionally, you will see a symbol in the top-right of the screen, which allows you to export the customer license data to a .CSV file. This option is available in every tab.
Speaking of all tabs, now that we’ve gone over the steps to get you selling to your first customers, let’s go back and talk about tabs, for longer-term customer management. When you’ve logged into the Reseller Console, and selected the Customers option, it will bring you to this view. As you can see on the left, there are 7 different tabs, which organize your customers into different groups. Each tab shows a certain subset of customers, and each tab has a quick overview of certain licensing details. At a minimum, each tab will show the Customer name and admin, the customer type (team, enterprise, or both), the market segment (commercial, education, or government), and the reseller user who manages the customer.
The first tab is for “Pending Invitations”. Under this tab, you will see all customers to whom you have sent an invitation for VIP, but who have not yet accepted that invitation. From this view, you have the ability to send a reminder, by clicking “Send Reminder” to the left. This will bring up a window where you can either enter a different email address to receive the invitation, or send a reminder to the same email address.
There is also an option to edit customer details on a pending invitation. Click the Organization name, and a link to “Edit Customer Details” will appear in the pop-up. After clicking “Edit Customer Details”, a new pop-up will appear which will allow you to change details, and save those changes. Then you can send a reminder to send the edited invitation.
On this tab, you can also delete duplicate, erroneous, or obsolete invitations. Click the trash icon in the top right, to populate pending invitations with minus signs. Click the minus sign for the pending invitation you want to remove, and it will prompt you to confirm. This is to ensure that no invitations are deleted accidentally.
The second customer view tab is “No Products”. This view shows only customers who have no products added within their console or purchased. This view is handy when determining which customers to whom you can reach out to sell.
Third, we have “Pending Requests”. This tab shows customers who have added Purchase Authorizations, but who have not yet submitted payment to Adobe. This view narrows down those customers for whom you need to create a PO. This view has a convenient overview of the quantity of pending licenses, as well as the time left to send payment to Adobe.
This next view is for “Past Due Requests”. These are customers who have added a Purchase Authorization, and who have exceeded their 30-day grace to submit payment to Adobe. These customers should be handled urgently, so that they can retain access to their licenses. This view will show the quantity of licenses which are overdue, as well as for how long they have been overdue.
The fifth view is for “Upcoming Renewals”. These customers are within 90 days of their Anniversary Date, and this view is meant to act as preparation for customers who will be entering their renewal period in the next 60 days. For each customer in this view, there is a breakdown of days left until their Anniversary Date, as well as the total of licenses they have, how many are active, how many are available, and how many have had users invited.
The second-to-last tab is for customers who are “Ready for Renewal”. This means that the customer is within their renewal period, between 30 days before their anniversary date and 30 days after their anniversary date. These are customers with whom you should be placing renewal orders. This view shows the time left before the renewal period closes, as well as a breakdown of the licenses, including the total of licenses, how many have been renewed so far, how many have yet to be renewed, then also how many licenses are active, available, and invited.
Finally, we have the “All Customers” tab. This shows all of the customers managed by your reseller organization. This view is the most generic, but still provides a breakdown of licenses, including their total, how many licenses are paid, pending, active, available, and invited.
All tabs, but especially the “All Customers” tab, are even more useful when you use the “Managed by me” option. This will filter your views into only those customers for whom you are listed as the managing reseller user. All other details within each view remain the same, but you won’t have to sift through customers that another user is responsible for managing.
