Having Office 365 tenants require to bought dedicated subscriptions.
Thankfully you can easily create a unique test or developer Office 365 tenant for free.
Microsoft offers the possibility to create a dedicated Office 365 tenant for development purposes. Microsoft 365 / Office 365 Developer program gives you the possibility to get access to Office 365 for free. You will be able to use it for 90 days or more.
Owning additional or multiple Office 365 tenants can really useful for your organization:
- You can build a development environment and fully separate it from your Office 365 production
- You can use it to test the new functionalities in case you are not using Target Release preferences
- You can play with Office 365 from perspective of global settings
- You can request additional preview program in separated space
- You can build great demo/poc/mvp environment
The greatest thing about that is that you can do that absolutely for free.
Parameters of the Microsoft 365 / Office 365 Developer program:
- You will be allowed to setup up to 25 user accounts
- Service could be used for the development, testing of Office 365. It cannot be used for production usage.
- Microsoft offers a 90-days fully-functional Office 365 subscription.
- ⚡ If you will actively use and build solutions on Office 365 Developer tenant it will be renewed every 3 months.
As part of the new Office 365 tenant, you will get access to most of the applications available in Microsoft offer.
Apps included into Microsoft 365 / Office 365 Developer subscription:
- SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook/Exchange, Teams, Planner, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more
- Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection
- Advanced analytics with Power BI
- Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) for compliance and information protection
How to get free Microsoft 365 / Office 365 tenant for developing purpose
Signing up for the Office 365 Developer program will require about 15 minutes. You will need to get through a few steps.
1. Sign-up or log into Microsoft Account
Open signing to Office 365 Developer program.
Log in in new window or sign-up for the Microsoft Account by clicking Create one! button.
In the next step set the email address and choose Next (1). The following screen will ask you to set up the password and to choose Next (2).
You will be asked to choose your Country/region (1) and Birthdate (2). Choose Next (3) to move forward.
At the last step, you will be asked to verify your email address by passing the validation code (1).
You can be also asked to fill ReCaptcha picture based validation. After it, you will have validated Microsoft Account and you can log in.
2. Signing up for the program
Open the Developer program site again by visiting the website again and choose Set up subscription (1) button.
Now you will need to fill the registration form by:
- choosing Country (1) – it cannot be changed later on
- setting up admin user name (2)
- confirming the tenant name in Create domain (3) field – the system will validate if it is available (4)
- passing the Password (5)
Choose Continue (6) button to move to the next step.
In the next step you will be asked to verify your mobile phone number. After it the creation of your tenant will start.
Your tenant subscription will be available in 1-2 minutes.
3. Create dummy users
You will need multiple accounts for testing purposes. you can easily generate them in Sample data packs section.
The automated generation process will generate 16 users. It will require you to log in to new tenant admin account. You can copy the user name by copy button (1).
After you will be logged you will be asked to allow the process to make changes to your new environment.
In the final step, you will be asked to setup a password that will be shared between all accounts. Note that password down.
As soon as the user will be set up you will receive email confirmation. When you login to the environment you will see dummy accounts deployed.
4. Fill in calendars and emails of the dummy users
In the next step you can setup the emails and calendars of created user bo choosing Mail & Events sample data.
You can execute the deploy by choosing Install button.
In the next 5 minutes your users will receive Outlook-related dummy data.
As soon as the user will be set up you will receive an email confirmation and environment will contain additional data deployed.
4. Setup SharePoint sites
You can also deploy the Office 365 SharePoint site. Just choose SharePoint button.
In the next step you will start setup of SharePoint sample data pack by clicking on Start button.
You will be asked to choose SharePoint site template (1) and then move to Next (2) step.
In the following screen you will be asked to setup the addresses for the SharePoint site. You can also left it as it is and move forward.
At the last step you will need to authorize again and Accept permissions for the deployment app.
In this case deployment process could be much longer. After 20-30 minutes your SharePoint sites will be deployed.
