This communication was sent 13 July 2023.

Notice 23-IZ | 13 Jul 2023

Sage Provisioning Portal

Update and reminder of policies and procedures

Ensuring customer security remains of paramount importance to Sage, and as such, we have established rules, terms, and guidance to support this principle. As and when we update our guidance, we make sure to share it with our partners and customers. Over the last few years, we have communicated updates to our rules and usage parameters for the Sage Provisioning Portal. Below, we have included the most recent and essential communications regarding these updates.

• Sage Provisioning Portal – Usage Parameters – October 2021
• Sage 200 & MFA - January 2022
• API Authorised Users for Sage 200 Standard – October 2022

As part of our communications, we shared the following important points from the changes, applicable to all Sage Provisioning Portal deployments:

• Authorised Users must be individually named, with individual email addresses – two or more users should not share email addresses and login information, as outlined in our Product Terms and helpfiles.
• Partners should only hold logins as a ‘partner type’ user. They should not create ‘customer type’ users, there is a single exception for this associated with SPC partner demo sites.
• Partner users should not be permanently attached to customer sites. This includes creating a customer user for partner use. Accessing a site is a simple approval process and the access lasts for 7 days.
• In all cases, adding additional users will notify the Customer Administrator of the site.
• Partners should guide customers to support them with managing their users for themselves, allowing them to effectively manage their site access.
• Partners should ensure customers are aware of the terms around creating users, including best practice.
• It is the partners responsibility to complete regular site audits, checking user access levels and removing users that have left a partner function – such as support, or those who have left your business.
• Sage employees will not add additional users to any site, they will only provide guidance. Sage employees are responsible for setting up the initial Partner Administration user that accepts the terms and conditions, or the Customer Administration user for directly supported customers. We encourage sites to have more than one administrator. You can see further guidance here, this outlines the types of changes pertaining to user and who is responsible for the change.

We continue to see the use of users in contradiction with our terms, so we ask that you urgently undertake an audit of your users within the next 30 days and remove those not in line with our terms.

Additionally, every quarter an email will be sent to partner & customer portal administration users to ask to complete a site audit, removing any users who are no longer in their business, in a department who should not have access to the software, or aren’t in line with our terms.

We thank you for your support in this matter and keeping security top of mind.

Sage 200 Professional changes (deployed via Sage Partner Cloud)

• Partners are responsible for ensuring effective site management. Details can be found in the Sage Partner Cloud Agreement that you agree to, as well as in the shared responsibility model available on the Partner Hub
• Partners should not use the site status to suspend or shelve sites if they receive cancellation notice. Please send the request through per our usual cancellation process and our partner loyalty team will process in line with our terms and conditions. The site will be in ‘stasis’ for 7 days after the deletion and after that date will be deleted.

We’ve observed that some partners are changing the status of sites to suspend them, this could be for a number of reasons for example non-payment, however where a customer is choosing to move to another Sage solution or vendor, our cancellation process should be followed, rather than the site being suspended.

Where partners do not do this and then take manual steps in Azure rather than allowing the provisioning portal to complete its necessary steps it can cause a disconnect between the systems.

We ask that you notify our partner loyalty team of the reasons for a suspended site, and the timeline. And for all those who are unfortunately leaving that the cancellation processes is followed.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please contact our support team by raising a case online.