This page contains information about New Commerce Experience trial subscriptions for Commercial and Public Sector NCE Trials.


Microsoft Indirect Providers & Microsoft Direct CSPs can use the NCE Trials feature both for the Commercial NCE and the Public Sector NCE products. More specifically, they can:

  • Automatically update their product catalog with the Trial availability on a product level.

  • Promote NCE Trials through their Marketplace.

  • Automatically activate & provide a Trial NCE Subscription.

  • Allow the Trial to end and purchase a new subscription, to get any promotion available by Microsoft and have the option to decide on the number of licenses and terms.

A customer cannot have both trial and paid subscriptions for the same SKU simultaneously. Due to the fact that this runs contrary to the Microsoft Partner Center implementation, the workaround is to create a paid subscription in the MPC and import it as such.

NCE Trial Product General Rules

With this feature, the interworks.cloud platform supports NCE Trials (Commercial & Public Sector) in the BSS and the Storefront.

The following rules apply for product trials:

  • When running Get Services Definition, no new products are created, instead, existing products are updated with trial options.

  • The provisioning and activation are automatic via the Storefront.

  • All trials usually offer 25 licenses for a period of exactly 30 days.

  • The trial period cannot be extended.

  • Free trials are available for some of the seat-based offers in the new commerce experience.

  • Once the trial subscription has been created, it can’t be canceled or suspended.

  • Auto-renewal is off by default.

Commercial NCE Trial Product - Example

Public Sector NCE Trial Product - Example

Commercial Trials.pngPublic Sector Trials.png

Limitation of Managing Public Sector NCE Trial Subscriptions via the Workspace in Storefront

Once a Public Sector Trial NCE subscription is created and provisioned, users in the Storefront via the Workspace module can manage the licenses associated with that trial subscription for every user and account, except for affiliate accounts. Future releases will enable trial license management for affiliate accounts as well.

Please note that NCE trial subscriptions cannot be created in the BSS or imported via the Import Customers Tool.

NCE Trial Subscription Notification Emails

If an error occurs, the subscription is created with a failed sync status. The BSS user can enable two distinct systemic notifications, which can be found under BSS Setup → Administration → Notifications → Customer Notifications → Subscriptions:

  1. NCE Trial Subscription Provisioning Failure.

  2. Public Sector Trial Subscription Provisioning Failure.

    NCE Trial Notifications.png

Once enabled, each of these systemic notification emails is sent to the responsible user of the account in case a failed NCE trial subscription is created. The body of each of the notifications contains the following, depending on whether the trial is for Commercial use or for Public Sector use:

  1. For Commercial NCE Trial Subscriptions:
    Trial NCE Subscription {#Leases.Name#} with quantity {#Leases.Quantity#}
    Provisioning for this New Commerce Trial Subscription {#Leases.Name#} has failed. For more information, please contact your system administrator. Please consider visiting Microsoft Partner Center in order to check the Auto-renew option’s value for this trial subscription.

  2. For Public Sector NCE Trial Subscriptions:
    Public Sector Trial Subscription {#Leases.Name#} with quantity {#Leases.Quantity#}
    Provisioning for this New Commerce Trial Subscription {#Leases.Name#} has failed. For more information, please contact your system administrator. Please consider visiting Microsoft Partner Center in order to check the Auto-renew option’s value for this trial subscription.

NCE Trial Subscription Conversion to Paid

After the trial period, a subscription enters the Expired state, where users can still access files and data for 30 days.

Please note that when an NCE trial subscription is created, it cannot be upgraded to a paid subscription. This option is not available in the BSS or in the Storefront.

The interworks.cloud Platform deactivates auto-renewal for all NCE trial subscriptions by default.

If the request to deactivate auto-renewal does not reach the Microsoft Partner Center, and there is a discrepancy between the two platforms, a notification will be sent informing the user of this.

Additionally, the Health Check Mechanism performs a check to ensure that the state of auto-renew is consistent between the MPC and the BSS, for both Commercial and Public Sector trial subscriptions.

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