[MUSIC]
>> Hi there, I'm Caity Cherniak,
a PM for Visual Studio Subscriptions.
Thanks for joining me today as I share some tips and
tricks to simplify your subscription assignments.
I'd like to talk about why it's important
to assign your subscriptions developers
and the difference between the Visual Studio IDE
and Visual Studio Subscriptions.
After you have an idea of what's included,
I'll take you a tour of the portal or we can do
some assignments and I'll share
some new features that should simplify the assignment process.
You may have already deployed
Visual Studio Subscriptions to all of your developers.
But have you completed
the important step to assign subscriptions to them?
When you assign subscriptions,
your developers can sign into
the Visual Studio IDE with their e-mail address,
removing the need for product keys.
Their subscriptions also give them
access to all of the benefits you see
here in the subscriber portal at my.visualstudio.com.
One of my favorite benefits is Pluralsight,
where your developers can access
hundreds of courses to improve their skills.
This benefit includes skill assessments and hundreds of courses
ranging from C# and Cloud development to machine learning,
blockchain, and even algorithm training.
Your developers also have access to
Azure credits that refresh monthly.
Developers can use these for DevTest
to learn and experiment with
new technologies before spending
company resources in your production environment.
If they need more Azure services,
they also have access to DevTest pay-as-you-go discounted pricing.
If your developers get stuck and need technical support,
they also have free support incidence
included with their subscription.
This allows them to get the help they need quickly and easily.
You know your developers have access to
Visual Studio when you assign subscriptions,
but did you know they also have access
to almost all of
the Microsoft software available for DevTest usage.
This is the downloads page where you can see
a sample of the most popular product downloads.
I'll share ways to control access a little bit later.
Now that I've shared the advantage of assigning subscriptions,
I'll share some tips and tricks on managing them in
our admin portal at manage.visualstudio.com.
You'll need to be set up as a Super admin or
admin on your organization's agreement if you aren't already.
Your primary contact on your agreement is automatically set up
as the first Super admin and should be able to give you access.
Once you're in the portal,
you'll see subscriptions that have already
been assigned by an admin in your company.
Here you'll see a dropdown where you can
toggle between agreements if you have access to more than one.
You'll also see some icons on
the left-hand side that open additional panels.
The first icon opens a overview
of what's available and assigned on your subscription.
It's broken down by subscription level so you can easily see.
Your second shows the agreement details including e-mails,
links to e-mail, any of your Super admins.
The third icon shows a maximum usage report,
which allows you to see the highest number of
assignments over a period of time.
If you're a Super admin like me,
you'll see a fourth icon that allows you to
expand and set agreement preferences.
These are super helpful to reduce
the number of steps when assigning subscriptions.
Since they allow you to set a default subscription level,
this will be used when you add an individual assignment.
Communication languages that are used to send our
initial welcome or assignment e-mail to your subscribers.
If you're using Azure Active Directory,
you can increase governance by disabling external subscribers,
which will allow you to only add
new assignments that are from your Azure AD tenant.
You can also add a contact e-mail address at the top,
where we'll send any e-mails that come from your subscribers.
Now, let's talk about how you can easily assign subscriptions.
We have a couple of different ways that you
can give your developers subscriptions.
Individually, where you can
search through your Azure AD tenant or
manually enter their e-mail address if
your organization isn't using Azure AD.
Through a bulk Excel template where you can
upload thousands of users at once using Excel,
and if your organization has
an agreement that can overclaim subscriptions,
you'll see a third option to use Azure Active Directory groups.
This is my personal favorite way.
Once you've added an Azure AD group
and assigned a subscription level to it,
anyone added to the group with an Azure AD
will automatically be given a subscription,
and anyone removed from the group
will have their subscription removed.
This helps you automate assignments by creating groups
for Teams or all developers within your organization.
When new developers join the organization,
they simply need to be added to
the appropriate Azure AD group and they can start
using their subscription immediately without
you or another admin needing to do anything.
Regardless of whether you're using
an individual Azure AD group or the bulk Excel option,
you can control access to downloads and product keys.
For individuals or Azure AD,
access is controlled using this Toggle.
Be sure to choose the correct country and language so that we know
what language to send to
your developers for their assignment e-mail.
We also have a reference field where you can add notes.
If you already have individual assignments,
but want to simplify things by
switching your users to use Azure AD groups,
we've made this process easy for you.
You'll see here, Esteban and I both have individual assignments.
We both have Visual Studio Enterprise assigned to
us and are not being managed there in Azure AD group today.
When I add an Azure AD group
that is the appropriate subscription level
that we're both members of,
you'll see we will be absorbed by
the group and managed by the group moving forward.
You'll see this group is syncing right now and
momentarily it will be
successfully added and will be managed there.
Today there is no limitation to the group size,
but one thing to note is that we don't support nested groups.
You will want to make sure that all of
your developers are directly members of the group.
We've also recently updated our filtering so you can
easily search and type for people based on their name,
their e-mail address, or reference field.
Or use the pickers to search for specific subscription levels,
who has download access or languages.
Check out the admin dashboard
for an overview of what's happening on your agreement.
You can see a quick overview
of which admins have made what changes.
Or click this button to download
a full export of the past 30 days.
Lastly, we have a Support tab.
Today it has how-to videos,
helpful resources, and an FAQ section.
By the time you're watching this video,
it's very likely that
this new feature will be live where you'll be able to submit
help tickets and get help directly in the portal for
anything that these FAQs don't address.
We also have a feedback button
where you can share your feedback for
a specific or generic feedback
relating to specific pages of the page.
Don't be afraid to share the good, the bad, and the ugly,
and just know that I do read this on
a daily basis and it does not go into a black hole.
Thanks again for watching and I hope
I was able to show you something new today.