Microsoft allows their partners to offer a 30-day free trial to customers who wish to evaluate O365 Premium, E3, E5 and other plans and can convert these customers to a paid subscription at the end of the free period. Our platform automates the management of Office 365 trials by automatically enabling the trial option for the eligible Office 365 plans and by allowing your customers and your resellers to get a trial for the plan they wish to evaluate.

Enablement Process

The activation of the trial option for the plans that Microsoft allows free trial is done from the "Get Services Definition" process. This process checks - by calling Microsoft API - which plans offer free trial and activates the Trial option automatically. The same process also handles any removal of the free trial option from Microsoft side, by disabling this option in the corresponding BSS product.

Microsoft keeps different SKUs for the trials and our system relates these SKUs with the "production" SKUs in the "MS Service Trial Plan" product characteristic. This characteristic is a new property that we introduced in our system for supporting the trial process.  Since all Microsoft trials are for 30 days, all Office 365 plans have trial period equal to 30 days.

NOTE: The "Get Services Definition" process will no longer create any BSS products for the trial SKUs.

Finding which Office 365 plans offer free trial

For checking which Office 365 plans offer free trial, you should search for products with the filter "Trial Enabled" is equal to Yes. You can also create a report using this condition, so that after any Office 365 product catalog update, you can easily find which products have the trial option.

Enabling the trial Option for your Product Groups

If you are presenting your plans in Storefront as part of a product group, the trial option will be enabled for all plans that support trials. So, you customers and resellers can easily select the trial they wish from the list of the available plans for a product group. Furthermore, you will able to select a default trial for your group in case your customer selects the trial option from the list of the products.

Defining the Default Trial for your Product Group

For setting a default trial for your product group, you must select a plan that supports free trial and then to select the action "Set for Trial".

By selecting this action, the icon  will be displayed next to plan name for understanding that this is the trial for this product group.

In Storefront, the "Try Service" button in the first page or the analogous button in product group details page will be for this plan.

Business Rules that Apply to Office 365 Free Trials

Our system complies with the rules Microsoft follows for the trials since the following business rules are enforced from our system:

1. Free trials do not automatically convert to paid. The customer must manually upgrade the subscription to a paid subscription.
2. A customer cannot get two or more trials for the same Office 365 plan
3. If a customer has a paid subscription, he cannot get a trial for the same plan
4. If a customer has a trial subscription he cannot purchase the same plan. He must upgrade his trial subscription to a paid subscription.