Did you know that, as a Microsoft Partner, you can get a free demonstration environment and some guide materials for the new Office and Office 2013 without requiring a full installation locally? Well, I didn’t until James Akrigg (@jakrigg) posted the following tweet:
Curious as I am, I wanted my own demo environment. As I have a partner login associated with my Live ID, I decided to give it a go. Point your browser to https://www.microsoftofficedemos.com/ and click on the ‘Microsoft Partner’ link. You have to provide your credentials to continue. Once you’re successfully logged in, you will see some information about this offer, but the most import things are:
- Subscription includes an Office 365 Enterprise SKU trial tenant (note: this tenant is subject to trial restrictions, including a 30-day expiration)
- Subscription includes an Office Enterprise Hero Demo guide which provides talking script and clicking guidelines
That’s great, let’s create one. Click on the “Create Demo” link on top of the page. You will now see the options of the demo environment like the type of Office 365 Tenant, the demo content and the demo language. As for now, it looks like you cannot change the options. I guess that there will be some more options available in the future.
Click on “Create Your Demo”. You can now enter a tenant name and type the correct robot number.
Once you click on “Create My Account”, you will see the provision status of your tenant. Something like:
That’s all you have to do. If you read the questions from the FAQ section, you will see that the process will take 8 to 36 hours, depending on service availability. You will receive a completion email when the content provisioning process has been completed. You can easily check the status of your tenant by entering your tenant name in the ‘Domain’ box. (Or use the link in the email did receive after you registered your demo instance.
Having a demo environment is one thing, showing the new goodies are another thing. That’s where the demo guides and documents come in. You can find an impressive list of guidance documents by clicking on the “Resources” link on top of the page.
Small note: You can login using the following two credentials: KatieJ@tenant.onmicrosoft.com and RobinC@tenant.onmicrosoft.com
Thanks to the Office team for making this available!
This is really cool. Thanks for sharing! I had few problem creating a “New demo” environment so I went an create a 30 days trial and than provision the content on it. That solve the problem for me.