The process for signing up for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement trials has recently changed. The old trial would provision an instance of Dynamics 365 with 25 licenses which were good for 30 days. The new trial provisions an instance for 30 days, but only allows five users. Not that big of a change, you say? Of course, the devil is in the details of how you manage adding those users and how the instance is provisioned within your Office 365 tenant or a trial tenant if you are not already a customer.
I have reviewed the documentation provided here. This article is to provide insight to some pitfalls we ran into when using this new process as an existing Office 365 customer. If you are NEW customer go to the documentation here. This process will be more straightforward as there is no existing user base or tenant for the D365 trial to be provisioned within. Partners or developers working on projects or just trying out some new configurations will find this process helpful as well. Partners can go here and follow the process to add the trial to an existing tenant. Existing customers can go to this site – this is same site as the one for Microsoft partners but the work email used to sign up is the key to where this trial becomes provisioned.
Tips for User when Signing up for Trial
1. Use Global Admin to sign up
– There are several things behind the scenes that need to be configured when D365 is provisioned. Using the user with the elevated permissions will make sure all components are delivered as planned.
2. User must have a mailbox
– DO NOT USE a temp or service account which may not have a mailbox associated with it.
– The initial user who signs up for the trial becomes the owner of that trial.
– Adding new users to the trial requires an email being received and sent.
3. User domain matters
– When filling out the work email the @mycompany.com portion of the email is how Microsoft will locate your existing tenant.
– All future users for the trial will have to sign up with the same email domain.
– DO NOT USE a subdomain or tenant domain.
– Subdomain example: tom@div.mycompany.com
– Tenant domain: tom@mycompany.onmicrosoft.com
Add Users to a Trial
This Microsoft documentation guides users through the multiple steps to add a user.
Tips for adding a user to a trial
1. User must do this themselves
– When they navigate to trial and sign in, they are going to be using their network credentials.
2. User must have an email mailbox
3. User must use same email domain as trial owner
– The email domain is how the tenant is located.
4. Trial owner will receive email to approve user
– User will receive security role when approved, but you may need to go in and add security role specific for the intent of the trial.
– The user can take 15-60 minutes to appear.
Closing Thoughts
I found this new process to be very cumbersome and I did not feel that it was user friendly for our clients. However, I understand the desire for Microsoft to limit trial instances and manage them more accurately for any Office 365 customer or a potential customer. If you follow the tips above when enrolling, everything should work fine for you. Remember you only get five users who can be added and you can only have five trial instances at one time. Also, keep in mind if you have already done a trial for your Office 365 tenant, you will not be able to sign up for another one, after your five are used up. Let us know what your experience has been with setting up trials and share any tips you may have. We are always excited to engage with you and we always have time!
