Affordable Access to Tier-2 Sandbox for D365 F&O: Empower Your Pre-Sales Demos and Training

With a lot more features getting added to D365 F&O functionality, it became extremely critical for partner companies and consultants to have their own D365 environment for pre-sales demos and internal training etc.,

Deploying the D365 F&O in the dev box may not be a solution at all times because there are certain features like Planning optimization, Dual write, Financial insights etc., that demand a Tier-2 sandbox environment. The good news is you need not be a Gold or Silver-certified partner to get access to your sandbox environment.

Recently we needed a Tier-2 box and got to look for the available options and I thought this info may be useful for someone who is in a similar state.

Here is how you can get a Tier-2 environment access. 

1. As a Microsoft partner, you can enroll in certain partner benefit programs that would give you software licenses and some cloud benefits. “Partner success core benefit” is one of those programs that gives us access to the sandbox environment.

Login to partner center dashboard and navigate to the membership page. https://partner.microsoft.com/dashboard/v2 

Well, certainly there is some cost associated with enrolling in this program but the Azure credit of 2400 USD, Office 365 licenses and many other software and cloud benefits would recover your cost.

We did enroll in this program and there are many benefits that we could leverage.

2. If you find the first option is not a suitable one for you, the other option is to purchase the sandbox license as a standalone where the minimum license count is 25 users.

You can reach out to Microsoft Partner Sandbox Fulfillment team to check your eligibility to purchase the sandbox. They can be reached at psandbox@microsoft.com.

I believe this would fall within the budgets of most companies.

As the membership fee and the license cost vary based on the geographical location, I didn’t provide those figures here. I would recommend you to work with your Admin who has access to the partner center dashboard and see what works best for you.

Hope this will be helpful for some of you.