Power Platform is an amazing set of low-code products. Although most people with a work account and a Microsoft 365 license can already make use of a lot of its functionalities, it can be difficult to find a clean environment to learn and experiment with the products. In many organizations, the IT department, rightfully, limits most of these tools.
So what can you do if you do want to experiment, but your company doesn’t allow it or you don’t have a work account? Luckily Microsoft has got you covered.
In this blog, I’ll explain how you can get (nearly) full access to a Microsoft 365 tenant and power platform, using the Microsoft developer programs.
Microsoft 365 Developer program
First of all, you need to enroll in the Microsoft 365 Developer program. This program grants you lifetime access to a development Microsoft 365 E5 license, as long as you don’t abuse it (read: use it for production purposes) and as long as you stay active on it.
The program is very generous in what it provides, including:
- 25 user licenses
- Teams
- Sample data
When you enroll, you create a new tenant specifically for you. You can see this as a whole new Microsoft 365 work environment, just as you would create when you buy a license for yourself or your company. The steps to follow are:
- Click on “Join Now” on the Microsoft 365 Developer program website.
- Login with your Microsoft account. This doesn’t need to be a work or school account, so any Microsoft account will do.
- Select your country, company and language preference.
- You’ll be asked some questions about how you intend to use it and what apps you’re most interested in. It doesn’t matter what you select here.
- Then you can choose instant sandbox or configurable sandbox. If you’re just getting started, the instant sandbox will be preconfigured with users and teams, so you’ll be able to start fast.
- Set up your sandbox admin account. This is an important step! Remember your admin username and password, because you’ll need it later.
- You’ll need to verify your phone number to proof you’re a real human.
- After that you’re good to go and your developer subscription will be set up.
Once the setup is done, you’ll arrive at the dashboard. The most important information is shown in the box below:
If you sign in to office.com with your administrator account and browse to all apps, you’ll see a huge amount of apps at your disposal!
The created users and admin account all have access to Teams, Sharepoint and a lot of other M365 goodies, including Power Apps! However, to my understanding, the M365 developer plan will not allow full dataverse or premium connector access. On top of that, you don’t have your own environment, only the default environment.
To fix this, we need to go one step further.
Power Apps Developer Plan
The Power Apps Developer Plan is a new version of the previous community plan. This requires a work or school account. So what if you don’t have this? Luckily we just created a work tenant in the step before!
The plan grants you access to:
- Power Apps including premium connectors
- Power Automate
- Dataverse
Just as the Microsoft 365 plan, this one does not expire as long as you actively keep using it and don’t abuse it.
Some limitations of the plan:
- It cannot be used for production purposes, this is strictly for building, testing and learning.
- 750 flow runs per month
- 3GB maximum database size
- No AI builder rights, except for a limited time trial
- No Dynamics 365 apps are available
To enroll for the developer plan:
- Click on the “Get started free” button
- You need to enter a work or school email address. Fill in the admin account of our M365 developer plan.
- Run through the wizard and you’ll be automatically redirected to the power apps website.
The end result – Your FREE learning environment
It can take some time to provision the new environment, but after a while, if you browse to the power platform admin center, you’ll see 2 environments, the default one, created by the M365 plan for all users in your tenant, and a developer one, created specifically for your user.
If you browse to the Power Apps website and select the Developer environment in the top right corner, you’ll see that this one has a fully deployed Dataverse. On top of that, it grants you some extra perks that you wouldn’t have with just the E5 license.
And that’s it! You can now get started with Microsoft 365 and Power Platform! Let me know if this setup works for you.