While this may seem a trivial task, trials are a great way to get the feel of a product before purchasing an actual license. The trial we are going to spin up today will be an enterprise version of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement.
To begin the process, navigate here. Follow the steps as per the screenshots below:
Fill in your unique details:
Create your tenant where your Dynamics 365 instance will be provisioned:
Prove you're not a robot:
Save your login credentials:
Next, customise your trial instance with the pre-built components that you wish. I like having all available functionality, so I will chose the 'All of these' option:
Finally, you will be redirected to your Dynamics 365 instance. Congratulations, it's that easy! You should also receive an email from Microsoft confirming your trial environment has been successfully provisioned.
One thing that does not automatically provision in a trial instance, is the CRM portal that is included in the trial instance. Let's go ahead and do this too. First, navigate to the Office 365 portal here.
You should be presented with a screen like this where you can select the 'Admin' tile:
On the lower left hand side of the screen, you should see a menu with the 'Admin Centers' option available to you. Click on this.
Next, you should see a list of the Admin Centers available to you, as follows:
Click on the Dynamics 365 option and you should be presented with a screen like this:
From here, select the 'Applications' tab like this:
You should then see a screen where you can select to 'Manage' the Portal Add-On. Enter in your portal specific choices (I am going to use the Partner Portal as I am going to leverage some of the functionality in future blog posts) like this:
*Note that you have several portal templates to chose from and these just provide you with some pre-built solutions in your Dynamics 365 instance so that you can accelerate your time to value. For a list of portal templates, click here.
Once you've clicked 'Submit' you will be asked to login with your Microsoft account like this:
*Use the same credentials you were just given for your Dynamics 365 trial instance.
Next, accept the permissions ask from the portal like this:
You should then be presented with a portal provisioning screen like this:
*Typically, after 5 - 10 minutes you can refresh the screen and your portal will be provisioned resulting in the admin page being presented as such:
Finally, you should be able to launch your portal like this:
Easy as that! Lookout for a coming blog post that will dive into adding external authentication providers to you portal.