Your Digital Transformation journey starts here!
Dynamics 365 Business Applications are a set of enterprise applications that can help an organisation of any size digitally transform itself. There are several different functional areas where an organisation can invest itself and adopt the latest and the greatest of the technologies. However, to start with the evaluation, incubation, laying hands and deciding to adopt, one needs to start with the trial of the application suite.
In this post I will start with hand holding the business users and technocrats to start with this trial and evaluation journey.
To start with the trial of Dynamics 365 Business Applications, you can look to start the journey at https://trials.dynamics.com
While it may seem pretty obvious to select one of the tiles which closely relates to the functional area or module you may be interested in, viz, – Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service Automation, F&O, Business Central, HR or Retail….. and selecting your Work email & Phone number, more often than not, it would not help you if you are setting up the trial as a freelancer, demonstrator or the person trying to build a test demo trial.
So, what is the other way?
You see the tiny statement between the tiles and Work email, that says –
Click on “Sign up here” and it will give you a pop-up like this,
As it is obvious, we may not be interested to sign up as a partner or Microsoft Employee (because the former has some amount of checks & rules to abide to, latter may not be the case mostly), so click on “No, continue signing up”. This would bring us to the following page, and this is where we can start creating a new trial.
In the form, select the region you want your trial to be churned in, provide the First & Last Names, and when it comes to “Business Email address”, you may provide your personal Hotmail, Gmail or other mail provider email address. I would suggest you to still provide your real “Company Name” to be gentle to Microsoft Sales who apply a lot of intelligence tools to understand the pattern of trial subscriptions and potential sales opportunity (we owe this much to them in return of a lot of good stuff in the trial). Also, provide a realistic organization size & click “Next”. This will take us to the next step as below –
Select the Username of your choice and needs, e.g., Admin or Albert or Brian or Rachel, select the “Yourcompany” part of the account as something may be “abccompanydemo” or “akhilsalestrial” or anything that may make sense to the purpose your are building the trial instance for. My strong suggestion is to use the words “demo” or “trial” in the company name, to make it easier for everyone to relate to the purpose of this being “non-business” or “non-production”.
Pick a password of your choice, everyone understands the discipline to pick a strong password….. 🙂
At this point, you may want to decide if your trial journey would eventually get converted to a production subscription or you may want Microsoft to line up its partners to reach out to you for your implementation needs. If the answer is ‘Yes’, do not forget to check the checkbox before clicking on “Create my account”.
I would stop here for this part of the blog post, keeping in view that someone looking to quickly start with a Dynamics trial may find the long post overwhelming. I will cover the steps to pick up the right functional area as part of the trial setup, in my next post. Cheers! 🙂