Forum Discussion
Office 365 subscription disabled for fraud- Help?
It's possible, but I think unlikely. When we started the trial, we asked Microsoft to increase the number of trial licenses to 50 and they did that on 1/5 and we were running like that for two weeks. They will frequently add extra licenses to a trial (or extend free trials) if requested.
I wasn't aware that trial subscriptions are for non-production environments. I typically allow customers to testdrive office 365 via a hybrid migration, as in the case here. We connected their on-prem services and migrated most users. We were in the process of finalizing the user count.
My understanding, and I may be wrong, is that this is the purpose of a trail - test it out and If you like it, they can buy it by converting it to a full subscription. If it's only for dev/test data, why would you be able to convert it to a paid subscription?
I don't remember reading any Microsoft documentation that says trial subscriptions are a lower form of service and are not for production environments.
It's very tough for a company to testdrive email on a dev/test email account. They will log in once, say, "that's nice" and go back to work in their production email account. They won't testdrive it until they are forced. Microsoft knows this, hence the trial subscription.
- One thing is create a trial tenant for a POC and testing purposes, but another is just to put the customer to run real business there because you are putting them at risk as you have experienced by yourself. To be 100 % sure you are fully "protected" against trial side effects is better to buy production licenses as soon as your customer asks you to start using Office 365 for business and not for testing purposes
I agree with the observations already made that a test tenant is just that - a test. It is not a production environment. If you want production-quality support, then you should pay for it. I'm sorry for the trouble experienced in this case, but anyone who lets a customer move their production data into a test environment is asking for trouble. A test Office 365 tenant is essentially an entity that can be torn down at any time - and you should expect that to be the case. Once you start paying for a service, you can demand that service, but when you're facilitating people to do work on a service that they get for free, then I am afraid that you have to accept all the consequences of that decision, like the possibility that data might be lost, service interrupted, or that you lose access to the service at any time.
Hi Charles I hope you get your issue solved by Microsoft but can I ask you one thing? What does trial mean to you? Trial is itself is a testing and one never put business or production stuff for trial or test. It is your mistake. I may sound bad and rude but it is.
To me, a trial means the ability to test a system's suitability or performance. It's often difficult to test something without real data. A 'test' mailbox is vastly different than a 40GB mailbox with 20 years of calendar data. Performance is different. Testing one user is different than testing many users.
When I get a trial or evaluation of Windows Server software, Adobe CS, AutoCad, I get the full software for some time period. Again, a paid license key can be added to the installed product to end the time limitations of the trial. I'm not expected to uninstall the server or the software after the trial period, I just swap out a license key. This is the same as Office 365. If the trial is only expected for test/dev data, why does the option to covert a trial to a paid subscription exist? Wouldn't this only need to exist if the trial had production data in it?
And that's the rub here. Clearly the only differences between a paid and a trial subscription are the "license" and Microsoft's internal policies towards handling the different subscription types. The underlying software and services are identical.
The consensus here (among MVPs) seems to be that Microsoft treats trials differently - they can be shut down at any time. I don't remember seeing anything to this effect when I signed up for the trial. Some freeware (non-Microsoft software) will cripple trial versions but the user is provided the details of the trial limitations up front.
Can anyone point me to Microsoft documentation that outlines the limitations of Office 365 trials? All I can find is numerous forum posts that state the only difference between the trial and paid subscription is the time limitation.
Going forward, we won't use Office 365 trials with production data anymore. However, Microsoft offers free trials for lots of products - $200 in Azure credits for first year. Are these also governed by internal, non-published polices that allow Microsoft to shutdown services for any reason without notifying the customer first? Are these credits not for production use? If I have a customer with a $1,000 spend, and they use $200 Azure trial credits can Microsoft shut off any $200 of services anytime?
