Enable Product Trials

Owned by Oleg Melnykov
Last updated: Dec 11, 2023 by Panagiotis Papanastasiou
3 min read

An important feature of the product management facilities of interworks.cloud platform is the enablement of trial subscriptions for your end-customers. A trial subscription is a subscription that carries no charge for the customer, and provides full access to a product or service for a limited amount of time. Let's see how this can be configured at your Cloud Platform!

Activating the Trial Mode for a Product

In order to activate the trial mode for a product follow the steps below:

  1. Navigate to Billing → Products and load the product you need

  2. Click Edit to access the details of the product



  3. Activate the Enable Trial setting. Then specify the period and unit in either Days or Months, as well as the Quantity of trial licenses.

     

  4. For Configurable products, when you enable the Enable Trial setting, you will also need to provide the initial resource configuration that will be allocated with the subscription. Also, you can define whether the end customer will be able to modify this initial combination of resources.  

  • For simple products, the trial quantity will be the one specified in this field

  • The quantity of trial subscriptions will be unaffected by this field for Microsoft products.

  • For products from other service managers, the field is not editable.

When the trial mode is activated for a product then, based on the rules that are explained in the next section, two things happen:

  1. At the Storefront a new option is available for the product:



     

     

  2. At your BSS, when you navigate at the product screen, a new shortcut is displayed, where you will be able to start a trial subscription:

     

Basic Trial Subscription Rules

  • An Account will be able to ever have only one trial subscription for the same product.

  • If an Account has an Active, Suspended, or Inactive trial subscription for a product, this Account will not be able to create a paid subscription to this product, unless the trial subscription is canceled.

  • An Account that has a paid subscription to a product cannot initiate a trial subscription for the same product.

  • A trial subscription is created always having 1 as quantity of the underlying product. The quantity for the trial subscription cannot be changed during the trial subscription lifetime.

  • For configurable products, where the user can amend the resource allocation prior to creating the trial subscription, this allocation remains as is for the entire lifetime of the trial subscription.

  • An Account that has an active trial subscription cannot purchase the product of the trial subscription. The only options are to upgrade the existing subscription to paid and then proceed to amend other elements of the paid subscription according to the Account's wishes. E.g. add resources to a data center or increase the quantity of licenses for Hosted Exchange.