Forum Discussion
Office 365 subscription disabled for fraud- Help?
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?
To stay in your anology, it's like you get Adobe Photoshop trial edition, use it to do your work, and after 30 days the product is rendered unusable (expires), and you need to buy a license (or not) to be able to continue using it. Now, in this scenario, you find this probably normal, but when it comes to a SaaS product like Office 365 you don't and start to complain that you can't use Photoshop for work - did I understand this correctly? Also, the shutdown is not for 'no reason' - your trial expired.
When you sign up to a trial you accept the terms of the Trial agreement you can read here :-
https://www.microsoft.com/online/legal/v2/?docid=20
Within this you'll see the statement :-
6. Warranties.
a. No warranties. The Online Services and Licensed Software are being provided under this agreement on a temporary basis for use with your Trial Subscriptions. No warranties are provided under this agreement.
b. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES. EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT PROHIBITED BY APPLICABLE LAW, WE DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, STATUTORY OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION (i) REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, SATISFACTORY QUALITY, TITLE OR NON-INFRINGEMENT, (ii) REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES ARISING THROUGH COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE, AND (iii) REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES THAT ACCESS TO OR USE OF THE PRODUCTS WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE. THESE DISCLAIMERS WILL APPLY UNLESS APPLICABLE LAW DOES NOT PERMIT THEM.
It should be up to your customer to decide if they want to trust their company email etc under such terms, it clearly leaves you at significant risk of loss of service. As far as I've ever seen no companies provide free trials and accept any commercial liability, it would be crazy to do so, lots of exposure and no reward. Most would conclude that they couldn't use their business data or services without protection, but would be happy to use it for non-production with non real data.
It sounds like Microsoft have had serious issues with this trial, it would certainly be interesting to know if the credit card provided for the trial triggered the fraud detection.
When it comes to trial we test the feature and over all functionality. You don't want to test the stress test in this particular Office 365 / EXO. They run millions of accounts so I will be ok they can handle the load. For me If I want to test and show the demo with some real/production account I'd would want to show them the feature across the Office 365 from EXO to One dRive and Teams and how all work together. I'd never put all the 40 production mailboxes. Trial starts with some test user. Same way If there is a company with 1000 employees I am not going to start a a trial with 1000 user. I'd start or pick 10 people who are either influencer or decision maker for example.
The point I'm making you did't plan that way.
Even for Microsoft Fast Track I'd do the same and always think about the risk.
- In 365, it is the user subscription / license that is the trial - not the system / platform / infrastructure.
This is borne out by the fact that you can add trials to an existing tenant in which you have paid subscriptions - e.g. pay for E1, but trial Azure Information Protection.
I don't find it inconceivable that the issue experienced here could just as easily be experienced by a paying customer - the actions of an automated system deeming some action in some way fraudulent. - We think the same. But for customer real migration when the real licenses are on the way (migration date is close, the deal is closed, papers signed, only activation keys to VLSC does not still arrive), we go with trial licenses extended by Fast Track team. This is the only way as Microsoft encourage to do with trials for some real-world workloads. Extending with Billing Support is only for testing and showcases.
Whether the trial was extended or not, it was still a trial. I am not a lawyer, but I have worked with lawyers enough to understand that the word "trial" cannot be equated to "production." Anyone who assumes that they can move workload to a trial platform and expect that platform to be as stable, supportable, and reliable as a paid-for production-quality service is just plain wrong. This is not a consumer platform that has unknown characteristics. Office 365 has been available for over six years and is a well-understood platform. You only need a trial to validate that some stuff works the way you think it does or to understand how some on-premises workload can be moved to the cloud. But you never use a trial tenant for production work... and any CIO or customer executive who accepts that it is a good idea to move their mission critical workloads to a trial system needs to reconsider their decision making process.
TR
Michel -
The trial did NOT expire. We were less than 14 days in when we were shut off the first time. After the initial outage, Microsoft restored the trial and extended it for one YEAR as compensation for being without email and office applications for 6 hours. Two days later, the automated system disabled the trial subscription again and we were forced to convert to a paid subscription immediately to restore service. We are now a paying customer.
If the 30 day trial was expired, I'd have no complaint. We were shut off twice within the first17 days.
Microsoft has been unable to provide a reason the trial was disabled. Some automated system flagged the account as fraud. We have no idea why and they are investigating this. We were flagged twice for fraud. The second time we were shutoff was after we were told that we would NOT be shutoff again and the license portal showed one year trial expiring 1/4/2019.
One of two things happened here - either someone at the company was engaged in fraudulent activity (unlikely in this case) or Microsoft's automated fraud detection incorrectly identified this account as fraudulent. As a partner and admin, Microsoft should provide me the details of WHY the account was flagged for fraud. If it was something on our end (some internal system sending emails, etc), we would fix it and allow service to be restored.
It makes no sense to me that Microsoft can disable a customer without contacting them first. It also makes no sense that it took 6 hours each time to restore service. We didn't make any changes they just flipped a switch a turned us back on. This leads me to believe that it was their system that mistakenly identified the account as fraud. Let's face it - if we were engaged in fraud, they would not have turned us back on twice.
So, this is not the same as a Photoshop trail expiring after 30 days. It would be the same as a Photoshop trial that promised 30 days, expiring after 14 days, then Adobe re-enabling the trial for one year and apologizing to us and promising us they wouldn't shut us off again without contacting us first. Then two days later, Adobe shut us off again without contacting us.
