Trials and sign-ups for Business Central online

Article
11/29/2023

As a reselling partner, you can invite customers and prospects to sign up for any number of Dynamics 365 apps, including Business Central online and partner solutions based on Business Central, using the same account ID. These apps run side-by-side with each other, use different URLs, and display as separate tiles on the home.dynamics.com portal.

This means that you can show prospects a preview of what you are offering based on trials of Business Central and other Dynamics 365 apps.

Adjust the onboarding checklist to fit your solution, and provide in-app tours for key experiences. For more information, see Onboarding experiences in Business Central.

Prospects and trials

Prospects can contact you if they sign up for the Business Central free trial. This means that you can become their CSP partner. For more information, see Connect with customers.

Alternatively, you can create a more tailored trial environment based on the Business Central content pack on the cdx.transform.microsoft.com site. For more information, see Preparing Demonstration Environments of Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Tailoring trials for customers using the public trial

As yet another alternative, partners can create customer centric trials via the public trial offered by Microsoft without the need for CSP in the initial phase, until the prospect wants to subscribe to Business Central. These types of trials require more initial efforts from resellers in building these trial experiences as apps to be published to AppSource. The investment is justified by being able to pivot the trial experience by customer or segment type. For more information about these types of trials, see Create customer-centric onboarding experiences.

Some types of trials can be extended beyond 30 days. The following table outlines the types of trials that you can offer prospects:

Scenario	Trial period	Can be extended	Can be used for production
Prospect signs up for the free trial with their work or school email account, and then switches to My Company for a 30 day trial. Their trial is based on the Dynamics 365 Business Central for IWs license.	30 days	Yes Once through the in-product notification + once by the partner	Yes
Partner assigns the Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium Trial license to an existing client in Partner Center so that they can try out the Business Central full experience in My Company	30 days	No The partner can assign a new Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium Trial license for a second 30 days trial	Yes
Partner creates a test customer and assigns the Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium Trial license to that in Partner Center. Then they invite a client or prospect to that trial.	30 days	No The partner can assign a new Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium Trial license for a second 30 days trial	Yes

At any point during their trial experience, when they're ready, you can convert their trial to a paid subscription using the Partner Center dashboard. For more information, see Converting trials to paid subscriptions in the Partner Center content.

Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium trial

In the Partner Center, you can find a special license type called the Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium Trial license, which is a different way to give a prospect or an existing customer a trial experience using their own data. If you assigned the Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium Trial license to a customer's account in the Partner Center, then that also expires after 30 days. You can't extend the Premium trial, but you can add one more Premium trial license to give the customer an extra 30 days of trial. But when the second Premium trial expires, then the customer must either convert their trial to a paid subscription, or if the viral trial existed before starting the time-limited trial, it must be returned to use.

For more information, see Offer your customers trials of Microsoft products in the Partner Center documentation. If you have technical difficulties assigning this license, contact Partner Center support. For more information, see Report problems with Partner Center.

Caution

Make sure you understand the limitations of this type of trial, before you offer it to a prospect or customer. It is easy to convert this type of trial to a paid subscription, but if the prospect needs more than 30 days to decide, or if they want to add more than 25 users, then the viral trial is probably a better fit for them.

Extending trials

An organization can sign up for a free trial of Business Central. When they first sign up for Business Central, they get access to an evaluation version that does not include all capabilities in Business Central. They can then switch to the 30 day trial experience to enable all capabilities.

However, sometimes a 30 day trial is not enough to decide if they want to buy Business Central. In that case, they can extend their trial with an additional 30 days. For more information, see Need More Time to Decide Whether to Subscribe? in the business functionality content for Business Central.

Note

If you are a reselling partner, we recommend that you set up demo environments for prospects that need longer time to decide if they want to buy Business Central. You can also use demo environments to help customers train their employees, for example. Using the 30 days trials for training should be limited to just that short period. However, demo environments cannot be used for production. For more information, see Preparing Demonstration Environments.

If the prospect wants to extend the trial further than those 30 days, they must contact a partner. The partner can extend it another 30 days if the delegated administrator signs into the prospect's Business Central and runs the Extend Trial Period guide.

After those additional 30 days, the prospect must either purchase Business Central or abandon Business Central. At this point, they will have had up to 90 days with the trial experience.

Tip

As a reselling partner, you can suggest your prospects sign up for a trial, but you can also help set up a customized demonstration environment based on a sandbox environment or a trial environment. In both cases, you can easily add or remove functionality based on your prospects' expectations. For more information, see Preparing Demonstration Environments.

Prepare demo environments

As a Business Central reselling partner, you might want to have an environment that you can show prospects as part of pre-sales demonstrations. Depending on your requirements, you have several different options. For more information, see Preparing Demonstration Environments.

Embed apps and signing customers up

Specifically for partners that are in the Embed App program, signing up customers works differently. For more information, see Onboarding customers and creating environments.