Creating an Office 365 demo tenant

One of the big advantage of software as a service (SaaS) is supposed to be reduced overhead: there are no servers to install or configure, so provisioning services is supposed to be much easier. That might be true for customers, but it isn’t necessarily true for us as administrators and consultants. Learning about Office 365 really requires hands-on experience. You can only get so far from reading the (voluminous) documentation and watching the (many and excellent) training videos that Microsoft has produced. However, there’s a problem: Office 365 costs money.

There are a few routes to get free access to Office 365. If you’re an MVP, you can get a free subscription, limited (I think) to 25 users. If you’re an MSDN subscriber, you can get a tenant with a single user license, which is fine for playtime but not terribly useful if you need a bigger lab. Microsoft also has a 30-day trial program (for some plans: Small Business Premium, Midsize Business, and Enterprise) that allows you to set up a tenant and use it, but at the end of that 30-day period the tenant goes away if you don’t pay for it. That means you can potentially waste a lot of effort customizing a tenant, creating users, and so on only to have it vanish unless you whip out the credit card.

I was a little surprised to find out recently that there’s another alternative: Microsoft has a tool that will create a new demo tenant on demand for you. You can customize many aspects of the tenant behavior, and you can use the provided user accounts (which include contact photos and real-looking sample emails and documents) or create your own. There are even vertical-specific packs that customize the environment for particular customer types. And it’s all free; no payment information is required. However, you do have to have a Windows Live ID that is associated with a Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) account. If you don’t have one, you can join MPN fairly easily.

All this goodness is available from www.microsoftofficedemos.com. Here’s what you need to do to use it.

Go to http://www.microsoftofficedemos.com/ and log in.
Click the “Get Demo” link in the top nav bar, or the “Create Demo” link on the page, or just go to https://www.microsoftofficedemos.com/Provision_step1.aspx. That will display the page below. Note that you can download VHDs that provide an on-prem version of the demo environment if you want those instead.
Make sure you’ve selected “Office 365 tenant” from the pulldown, then click “Next”. That will display a new page with four choices, all of which are pretty much self-explanatory. If you want an empty tenant to play around with, choose the “Create an empty Office 365 tenant”. If you want one that has users, email, documents, and so on, choose “Create new demo environment” instead.
On the next page, you can choose whether you want the standard demo content or a vertical-specific demo pack. This will be a really useful option once Microsoft adds more vertical packs, but for now the only semi-interesting one is retail, and the provided demo guides (IMHO) are more useful for the standard set, so that’s what I’d pick. After you choose a data set, click “Create Your Demo”.
The next page is where you name the tenant, and where Microsoft asks you to prove you’re not a bot by entering a code that they send to your mobile phone. (Bonus points if you know why I picked this particular tenant name!) The optional “Personalize Your Environment” button lets you change the user names (both aliases and full names) and contact pictures, so if you’re doing a demo for a particular customer you can put in the names of the people who will attend the demo to add a little spice. The simple option is to customize a single user; there’s one main user for each of the demos (which I’ll get to in a minute), but you can customize any or all of the 25 default users.
Once you click “Create My Account”, the demo engine will start creating your tenant and provisioning it. This takes a while; for example, yesterday it took about 12 hours from start to finish. Provisioning demos is just about last on Microsoft’s priority list, so if you need a tenant in a hurry use the “create a blank tenant” option I mentioned earlier. You’ll see a progress page like the one below, but you’ll also get a notification email to the address you provided in step 5 when everything’s finished, so there’s no need to sit and watch it.

Once the tenant is provisioned, you can log into it using any of the test users, or the default “admin” user. How do you know which users are configured (presuming you didn’t customize them, that is)? Excellent question. The demo guides provide a complete step-by-step script both for setting up the demo environment and executing the demo itself. For example, the Office 365 Enterprise “hero demo” is an exhaustive set of steps that covers all the setup you need to do on the tenant and whatever client machines you’re planning on using.

Once the tenant is provisioned, it’s good for 90 days. You can’t renew it, but at any time during the 90 days you can refresh the demo content so that emails, document modification times, and so on are fresh. And on the 91st day, you can just recreate the tenant; there doesn’t seem to be any explicit limit to the number of tenants you can create or the number of times you can create a tenant with a given name.

While the demo data set is quite rich, and the provided demo scripts give you a great walkthrough to show off Office 365, you don’t have to use them. If you just want a play area that you can test with, this environment is pretty much ideal. It has full SMTP connectivity, although I haven’t tested to verify that every federation and sharing feature works properly (so, for example, you might not be able to set up free/busy sharing with your on-prem accounts). I also don’t know whether there are any admin functions that have been RBAC’d to be off limits. (If you see anything like that, please post a comment here.)

Enjoy!

11 responses to “Creating an Office 365 demo tenant”

Nathan O'Bryan

2014/06/04 at 11:40

Hey Paul – Might want to look at the hyper link for…

1.Go to http://www.microsoftofficedemos.com/ and log in.

I don’t think that goes where you think it goes.

- Nathan O'Bryan
  
  2014/06/04 at 11:43
  
  never mind – you fixed it.
  
  - robichaux
    
    2014/06/04 at 11:44
    
    Yep, but thanks for pointing it out. I always forget about OWA’s obnoxious hyperlink behavior.
- Luis Cardenas
  
  2015/06/28 at 17:50
  
  Why people has to put a huge effort to write a tremendous article (like this) to find that MS (as always) changed the URLs, and links now don’t work or they do anything but taking you to right place ?
  
SutoCom

2014/06/05 at 10:26

Reblogged this on SutoCom Solutions.

Patrick Yore (@pyore)

2014/06/06 at 07:07

Paul,
One of the cool things about this is that this demo portal can also be used to demo Azure Rights Management which is not available as part of the MSDN account portal.
Patrick Yore

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Colum

2015/01/05 at 08:24

Good article Paul,

Can you tell me if the demo tenancy can be set up to federate back to AD using ADFS and/or any other Identity Provider using SAML? Or is that restricted?

Thanks

Colum

- robichaux
  
  2015/01/05 at 08:28
  
  Thanks, Colum. I don’t know the answer to that– it’s on my list of things to try but I haven’t quite gotten around to it yet.
  
  - Tim
    
    2015/11/20 at 08:04
    
    Hey Robichaux,
    
    Did you have a chance to test adfs with this solution? i’m looking for a way to test myself, without having to purchase a license.
    
    Tim