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Unified admin trials (preview)

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[This article is pre-release documentation and is subject to change.]

Administrators, partners, and ISVs historically have had to use cloud-hosted environments in Lifecycle Services to create demo or trial environments for finance and operations apps. This was to demonstrate the software capabilities and try out new features of the product on a low-cost basis.

To improve this experience, Microsoft has made available free subscription-based trial environments for finance and operations apps, including Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations, and Commerce apps.

Important

  • This is a preview feature.
  • Preview features aren't meant for production use and may have restricted functionality. These features are available before an official release so that customers can get early access and provide feedback.
  • The trial environments don't support development with Visual Studio. For development, you'll need a developer-focused sandbox environment. More information: Install and configure development tools.

Acquire a free subscription-based trial license

The first step in deploying a trial environment is to acquire a trial license. This can be done by a tenant administrator in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and visiting the Marketplace option.

From there, you can search for many different products offered by Microsoft. To find a Dynamics 365 license for finance and operations apps, search for the terms Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations, or Commerce. Locate the free trial offer and purchase this product.

After the product is purchased, assign the license to an admin who can sign in to the Power Platform admin center and create the environment.

Deploy the trial in Power Platform admin center

  1. After the trial license is assigned to your user account, sign in to Power Platform admin center.
  2. Select Environments in the navigation pane. The Environments page is displayed.
  3. Select New to create a new environment. The New environment pane is displayed.
  4. Enter a name for the environment.
  5. Select your region.
  6. Change the environment type to Trial (subscription-based).
  7. Select Next.
  8. Select a Security group and choose to Enable Dynamics 365 apps.
  9. In the dropdown menu, select the template that is related to the trial license you were given, such as Finance (Preview).
  10. Select Save to start the deployment, which may take an hour to complete.

After the deployment is finished, you may use both Dataverse and finance and operations apps capabilities in a unified trial environment. This includes add-ins, such as Export to Data Lake, Planning Optimization, and Finance Insights, which were previously only available to paid customer environments in Lifecycle Services.