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.

Enabling Free Trial for your Office 365 Plans

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 this option automatically. The same process handles also 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 = 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 catalogue update, you can easily find which products have the trial option.

Ordering a Trial from Storefront

The products that have free trial will be displayed in your Storefront with this option enabled.

By selecting the "Try Service" option, the system will add the trial in customer's basket. The quantity will be 25 since Microsoft gives 25 licenses for their trials and there will be no pricing information since it's a trial subscription. 

The next steps are identical with the steps for the purchasing of any Office 365 plan. The system will ask for the end customer details  if the logged in user is a Reseller, it will ask for domain prefix if the customer is not already synced as a Microsoft tenant etc.

Upon completion of the checkout process:

1. A 30 days free trial subscription will be created in Microsoft partner center for 25 licenses
2. A trial subscription will be created in our system that will be accessible  from the subscriptions list in BSS.

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.