Forum Discussion
Demo Tenant
Hi jhobdell
Provided you have a valid credit card, you can sign up to Office/Microsoft 365 directly. I was in a very similar position to you a couple of years ago so I went this route to get some hands on experience of 365 as the company I was with at the time wouldn't fund it.
You can sign up as a trial - although you will still need to put in credit card details, you can cancel all licences just before the 30 day trial is up and won't be charged. I however kept a licence going so I could continue to test and try out O365 stuff without impacting production; for me I just counted it as training expenditure and provided I was getting training value out of it (I was) then it was worthwhile.
You can also do 30 day trials of other suites after you've signed up. For example, I started a 30 day trial on Office 365 business premium. About 6 months later I trialled the Microsoft 365 Business plan. If I recall correct, the trial gives you 25 licences to play with.
The one thing I found useful before signing up to the trial was making sure I had a solid plan on what I intended to do during the trial - it sounds nerdy, but I made sure I had a spare domain, various test VM's set up so I could replicate collaboration, CSV of the 25 odd dummy users ready for upload, a lab exchange box to try out Exchange hybrid etc. Basically a big checklist of "By the end of the trial, what skills do I want to gain or actions to say I've done". the 30 days can go very quickly and you don't want to waste time doing set up when you can be actually doing stuff.
Another useful thing I found was to start small and work up - i.e. Office 365 business Premium doesn't have the MDM stuff that Microsoft 365 Business does, which in turn has less features than E3 etc etc - there can be quite a bit to go through with which I would have found overwhelming - get familiar with the core things you are interested in (Teams, etc) and then look at stuff like Intune later rather than try it all in one go.
Anyway, that's been my experience. YMMV, of course
Hope this helps,
Mark
YadleyB Many thanks for your reply and hope this also finds you well. I'm currently working through Microsoft's Service Adoption specialist course on EdX with a view to improving our roll-out process (for MS365 stuff at least).
I'll definitely do some comparing and see what the best option will be, and whether my employer will allow me to do it in a test tenant alongside our production environment or something.
Thanks again and best wishes!
