keep tenant name reserved after trial

[Ingeborg Hawighorst]

Hello,

I have set up a trial for one of our customers. They have decided to postpone their Office 365 project by a few months at least, so they don't want to turn the trial into a paid subscription yet.

I've read some conflicting information about how long a tenant name is kept blocked after a trial expires.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/getting-hold-of-an-onmicrosoft-domain-once-se...

The tenant name should have been blocked for others for 180 days, but during that time some other company was able to register a tenant with that name.

Please don't tell me that the tenant name is not important, because it is. It features in the SharePoint URL and also keeping the tenant name as short as possible is important for file path limits.

So, what can I do to reserve that tenant name after the trial has expired?

[#2]

AFAIK, there is no way to reserve a tenant name so if customer decides not to convert the trial tenant into a paid one, it might happen the situation you have described. I'm not also aware of any official Microsoft document describing for how long a expired tenant is manteined in the datacenter so the tenant name cannot be used. Best thing to do here if you have this problem again is just to by a single license of the cheapest Office 365 plan so you not fall again in the same situation

[#3]

Or you know, just add another set of trial licenses 🙂 There's always something new coming out (E5, M365, etc), and there are also plenty of free licenses that will keep the tenant alive, basically any of the "viral" subscriptions would do. I have a "test" tenant I've kept alive for years now.