Cloud Assert rings in the holiday season by announcing the general availability of Usage and Billing Update 7 release for Windows Azure Pack (WAP).  This release introduces several enhancements and key new scenarios and features, apart from addressing bug fixes.

What's new in Update 7 release:

• New Offers: Pre-Paid only / pure Credit based offers can be provided with Windows Azure Pack using Cloud Assert Usage and Billing solution. This combined with variety of existing options gives ultimate flexibility for Service Providers to define offers that suits the business needs and be creative to provide unique offers.
• User Level Credits: Admins can now configure and adjust promotional credits at the user level, apart from plan level or metered resource level, with ability to auto-suspend subscriptions if user credits are consumed completely.  This enables Hosting Service Providers (HSP) to offer pure pre-paid plans in addition to existing metered / pay-as-you-go plans or combinations of these.
• Subscriptions are now grouped at the user level in the Admin Usage, Tenant Usage and Tenant Usage History tabs.  This should help ease UI navigation for admins and tenants alike.
• Admins can use custom formula in Pricing Profile configuration for computing usage of Metered Resources.  This enables interesting pricing models such as billing a virtual machine (VM) only when it is in use, or pricing a VM based on multiple metered resourced such as Memory, CPU, etc.
• Invoice Enhancements: Admins can add or edit invoice line items prior to Invoice generation.
• PDF Invoice Downloads: Admins can customize PDF template and enable generation of invoices as downloadable PDF documents for tenants.
• Admins can configure notification rules to generate alerts when credit goes above or below defined limits.
• Implement Custom Usage Collectors using C# Extensions: Admins can now integrate with custom usage providers by writing their own usage collectors using C# (.NET) extensions.  For example, non-WAP based services such as domain names, SSL certificates can be metered using custom C# extensions and integrated into the Usage and Billing solution.  Refer to Jagan's blog for more details about this hot new feature.

Can't wait to check out these latest features?  Register here to get access to this latest release.