I have been waiting a long time for this to become available, but now you are able to create an Office 365 trial environment, for free, which can be used for a whole year.

Demos.Microsoft.com has been available for some time now, for Microsoft Partners, and I have used it many times to create demo environments for Office 365 and Business Central, but until now I was only able to create environments that were valid for 90 days. Granted, that’s a lot better then a ‘normal’ Office 365 trial which is valid for 30 days.

The URL has recently changed to https://cdx.transform.microsoft.com but https://demos.microsoft.com also still works.

So how many tenants can you create as a Partner?

  • One Year tenants: 1
  • 90-Day Tenants: 5

What is the difference between demo tenants and a traditional Office 365 trial offer?

  • Traditional Office 365 trial offer provides users a 30 day Office 365 E5 license containing 25-seats with no tenant content.
  • Demo tenants provides users with licenses pertinent to the tenant type selected and also includes rich, demo-ready sample content (document libraries, emails, OneDrive contents, Yammer posts, etc.).

How do I create a Quick tenant?

  1. Navigate to My Environments
  2. Select Create Tenant
  3. Choose Quick Tenant from Type Selection
  4. And voila:

How do I now create a Business Central tenant?

  1. Copy your credentials, for example to notepad, and now goto https://trials.dynamics.com and register for a Business Central trial with the Office 365 email address which you received from the quick tenant you created:

  2. Now you can go to your administration center for Business Central:
    https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/your-tenant-id/admin
  3. There you can create a new production or sandbox environment, AND since the 2019 Wave 2 release, you can now also select your country:

How cool is that?!

 

 

7 Thoughts on “Create your own Microsoft Demos environment: for free and valid for 1 year!

  1. Interesting blog on Microsoft demos environment for free and valid for 1 year… Thanks for sharing.

  2. Maarten Gerritsen on August 6, 2020 at 12:36 said:

    Is this still working?
    I get the following error when hitting the ‘Get Started’ button:

    window.onbeforeunload=null;redirect=true;window.location = ‘https\x3a\x2f\x2fsignup.microsoft.com\x3a443\x2fcreate-account\x2fsignup\x3fsku\x3d6a4a1628-9b9a-424d-bed5-4118f0ede3fd\x26ru\x3dhttps\x253A\x252F\x252Fbusinesscentral.dynamics.com\x253FredirectedFromSignup\x253D1\x26products\x3d6a4a1628-9b9a-424d-bed5-4118f0ede3fd’;

    • Horia on August 26, 2020 at 09:59 said:

      Good morning Marrten,

      Try using tenant URL instead to active BC tenant, It looks to me that office account is not fully activated.

      https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/Tenant_ID/

      You can get your tenant ID from here

      https://www.nucleustechnologies.com/blog/how-to-find-office-365-tenant-id/

      Find Office 365 Tenant ID

      Find your Office 365 tenant ID (alphanumeric number) through Azure Active Directory:

      Log in to Office 365 with global administrator credentials. Click the Admin option. In Office 365, follow Admin Centers>Azure AD. The Microsoft Azure portal will get open. Go to Azure ACTIVE DIRECTORY tab and select the default active directory. Once it is selected, go to the URL at your browser window, there you will find the Office 365 tenant ID between /Directory/ and /directoryQuickStart. Note down that alphanumeric tenant ID.

      Or

      In the opened Azure Active Directory Admin Center, move to Manage tab and select Properties option. Now, go the Directory ID option, there you will get your Office 365 tenant ID directly.

      Regards, Horia

  3. Thanks for the great tip! This will help a lot with the struggles we are experiencing with demo environments.

  4. Thanks for the informative tip! It really helped me a lot with the demo environments.

  5. Thank you and I found it very helpful. Looking forward for my next demo.

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