Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of the Cloud Partner Portal for publishing single virtual machine offers. The Cloud Partner Portal enables our publisher partners to create, define, publish and get insights for their single virtual machine offerings on the Azure Marketplace.

With this announcement, new and existing publisher partners who wish to publish virtual machines onto Azure will be able to use the new Cloud Partner Portal to perform any of the above actions. This new portal will soon support all other offer types and will replace the current publishing portal in time.

The new improved Cloud Partner Portal

Today’s release has several new features that make publishing onto the Azure Marketplace a lot faster, simpler and easier.

Features of Today’s Release:

1. Org Id login support – This has been an ask from our publisher partners for a long time and we are adding support for Org Id to the Cloud Partner Portal. Additionally, the new publishing portal would support RBAC so that offers remain secure and publishers don’t have to make all contributors co-admins giving them only the level of access needed.

2. Get it right the first time – Everyone hates do-overs. There is nothing worse than spending time defining an offer and thinking you are done, only to hit an issue with the offer downstream. To prevent this, your offer is validated as you type. This reduces unwanted surprises after publishing the offer.

Additionally, we anticipate an overall reduction in time from starting defining an offer to actually publishing an offer.

We have spent a considerable amount of time in writing validations for every field within the offer to ensure when publishers click publish, their offer will publish successfully. Even as we ship, we are adding new validations with every release which make the process a lot more predictable.

3. Simplified publishing workflow – The new publishing portal has a simplified publishing workflow providing one path to offer publishing. There are no separate production and staging slots exposed to publishers. Publishers just need to ‘Publish’ their offers, and we take care of the rest.

Before an offer goes live, publishers are given a chance to review it and ensure that everything is working as expected.

4. Be more informed – The new Cloud Partner Portal lets publishers know even before they publish their offer about the steps their offer would go through along with estimated execution times. Along with the guidance around the workflows, we have notifications built into the portal which keep the publishers informed on your offer’s progress to getting listed on Azure.

5. Insights in the portal – The Cloud Partner Portal provides a direct link into the insights of an offer. These insights provide a quick glance and drilldowns into an offer’s health and performance on the Azure Marketplace. The insights portal also has an onboarding video and rich documentation that helps publishers familiarize themselves with its features.

6. Feedback is just a click away – The send a smile/frown button will be ubiquitous in the new portal. In a matter of clicks publishers can send feedback directly to the engineering team.

I can keep writing about the host of new features and capabilities of the new publishing portal, however the best way to discover these features is to take the portal for a spin.

If you are an existing Azure Publisher with a Virtual Machine offer, your account for the new publishing portal is already created. Please visit the Cloud Partner Portal and login using your current credentials. Please refer to our documentation if you would need any help in getting started.

Existing publishers can also let us know if they would like to get their offers migrated following the steps available to registered publishers. We also have a brand new seller guide that can help you navigate the Azure Marketplace better and get most value out of it.

If you are a new Publisher looking to publish onto the Azure platform, please fill up the nomination form here and we will be in touch with you.

As you try out the new cloud partner portal, please keep the steady stream of feedback coming in. We hope you enjoy using the portal as much as we enjoyed creating it for you.