If you’re a Developer and you need a place to quickly jump in and establish a Microsoft Azure / 365 tenant that you can use for your development purposes, you’re in the right spot. The Developer Tenant is good for 90 days and can come pre-provisioned with sample data packs to help in testing common scenarios.
The first step to success is going to the Microsoft Developer Program page here:
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program
This will take you to the landing page for the Developer Program – be sure to click the “Join Now” button in the middle of the page.
The short link to Join Now – https://developer.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/profile
That will take you to the familiar login page that Microsoft uses for most if not all of its properties. If you don’t have an account, no problem; you can sign up for it right there. For me, I just use my Personal Account.
Next, you’ll need to fill out some information and details about yourself so that Microsoft can provision the underlying Azure Active Directory tenant and set up the tenant with prebuilt data and users to speed up your testing activities.
Next, you’ll be asked to give a little more information about yourself in terms of your focus area.
Next, you’ll be asked a few questions about what kind of development scenarios you’ll be working with, in part to help in pre-populating information associated with the tenant.
Next, you’ll be asked if you’d like an Instant Sandbox or if you’d like a Configurable Sandbox. If you happen to go and select the latter option, it may take a little longer to provision your tenant.
After you make your selection, you’ll either be prompted for more details regarding how you would like to configure your tenant, or you’ll move forward with an Instant Sandbox. Opting for the Instant Sandbox and clicking Next, you should then be presented with something akin to this.
Note that if you want to have others come in and test but you’d prefer not to give away your Admin password, Microsoft makes it simple to let you set something else up for the 16 fictitious users that it sets up on your behalf as a part of the Instant Sandbox. After you’ve completed this portion, click Continue.
Like most Cloud providers, the preference is that Bots not be given the ability to provision resources in the Cloud so Microsoft performs a standard check to validate you are a person by sending a text message to you. You’ll be confronted with a page similar to this:
After responding validating that I’m a person by entering the response code within the SMS that Microsoft sends, I’m finally in and I see the details of my Developer tenant.
Microsoft has put together some quick start documents associated with the tenant based on parameters selected during the provisioning process. They’re pretty handy and even include a walk through of working with an Outlook Add-in.
If you find yourself stuck, feel free to ping me on Twitter or tag your tweet with something like #microsoftdev and you’ll be bound to get help.
Remember that this tenant is good for 90 days.
Happy Developing!
The Tech Blog of Dan Usher 