Enabling and approving end user requests for Private Marketplace

In November 2018, we launched Private Marketplace, which enables you to create a custom digital catalog of pre-approved products from AWS Marketplace. Customers loved the granular control to create an approved catalog of AWS Marketplace products for their organization.

I also heard from customers that it would be helpful to allow end users to request AWS Marketplace products that were not currently on the organization’s approved list. This would allow administrators to look at and respond to software requests within their entire organization.

I’m happy to announce that we heard your feedback and have now launched end-user requests for Private Marketplace.

Enabling and using end-user requests for Private Marketplace

Prerequisites:

• You have set up Private Marketplace in your AWS Organizations
• You have IAM permissions to administer Private Marketplace. You can use the managed policy AWSPrivateMarketplaceAdminFullAccess to get access.

Setup

• Log in to your Private Marketplace for AWS Marketplace using the Private Marketplace administrator credentials, as shown in the following screenshot.

• In the white box on the right third of the screen under Software requests, select the Requests On radio button, as shown in the following screenshot.

Walkthrough steps

End user experience

• Log out of your AWS account. Log back in to your Private Marketplace for AWS Marketplace using your end-user credentials. Note the end user can have the managed IAM AWSPrivateMarketplaceRequests or AWSMarketplaceManageSubscriptions policy attached to them and must not be an administrator.
• At the top middle of the screen, enter your search terms into the search field. I entered firewall.
• In the left sidebar under the Procurement, unselect the Approved products filter, as shown in the following screenshot.
• At the top middle of the screen, select the magnifying glass to the right of the search field to search.

• In my Private Marketplace, the first two products listed do not have the green Approved for procurement. To submit a product for approval, select a product you want that is not currently approved. In this example, I selected Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall. Before the product listing, a red banner indicates This product is not approved for procurement. If you would like to subscribe, create a request for approval. Refer to the following screenshot.

• At the upper right, in the red banner, select Create request to request addition of this product in your Private Marketplace.
• The pop-up Submit request for product approval appears, as shown in the following screenshot. Enter your email address and reason for requesting the product. In the lower right, select Submit request. See the following screenshot.
  
• A confirmation will be provided upon submitting your product request, as shown in the following screenshot.

• To see your Product status page and the status of your pending requests, you can select Product request details, as shown in the following screenshot. Otherwise, select Close.

Administrator experience

• Log in to your Private Marketplace for AWS Marketplace using your Private Marketplace administrator.
• On the administration screen, a Pending requests tab shows all end user product requests.
• Select View details for the pending request. This takes you to the product information page. Refer to the following screenshot.
• On the left under Status, select View details to look at the request reason and email address of the requester, as shown in the following screenshot.

• Select Close to close the detail box to return to the product information page. To approve the request, select the orange Add to Private Marketplace button on the right. To decline it, select I chose to approve the request. Refer to the following screenshot.

• Log out of your Private Marketplace.
• Log back in to your Private Marketplace for AWS Marketplace using your end-user credentials. Select Explore your Private Marketplace.
• On the top right of the page, select your user name to see the drop-down menu. Select Your Private Marketplace Requests.
• On the Your Private Marketplace requests screen under Software requests, you should see the status for our software request as added. Refer to the following screenshot.

• You can now subscribe to the product you requested for in your Private Marketplace. To do so, select the product on your Software requests page. When you arrive at the product page, select Continue to Subscribe in the upper right.

Conclusion

Private Marketplace helps organizations enforce compliance of their procurement policies by creating an approved catalog of products from AWS Marketplace. Now, users of a Private Marketplace can request products that are not yet approved for use. This enables Private Marketplace administers to review these requests and ultimately accelerate self-service procurement in their organization while maintaining compliance and controls.

If you have questions about implementing any of the solutions described in this post, start a new thread on the AWS Marketplace Discussion Forum or contact AWS Support.