Stay ahead of the game with the latest updates to the Microsoft 365 Developer Program
February 2024 Update: At this time, we are limiting access to the Microsoft 365 developer subscription to developers and/or organizations with active subscriptions to Visual Studio Enterprise. The following Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program participants can contact their Microsoft partner to be added to an allow list to receive access to a developer subscription:
- ISV Success
- Solutions Partner
- Specialization/Expert
- Managed Partners
- Premier or Unified Support plan members
If you do not currently qualify for a developer subscription, you can purchase a single license Microsoft 365 plan and configure it for development. You also have the option to purchase a Copilot license as an add-on. Members who currently have a subscription are not affected by this change.
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The Microsoft 365 Developer Program is an excellent resource for developers looking to create solutions for the Microsoft 365 platform. The program offers a Microsoft 365 E5 developer subscription, access to sandbox environments, and a range of developer tools and documentation. Additionally, members have the opportunity to provide feedback to help shape the future of the platform.
Program updates
We value your trust. As part of the Microsoft Secure Future initiative, we’ve made the following improvements to the Microsoft 365 Developer Program.
Updated service plans. The Microsoft 365 developer subscription now includes service plans that were previously missing. For a complete list of the service plans that are included, see Product names and service plan identifiers for licensing.
Geographic limitations. For technical and security reasons, the Microsoft 365 Developer Program only supports a subset of countries/regions listed here: Microsoft 365 International Availability. We review our supported country list regularly. If you are unable to sign up from your country or region, then it means we do not support it at this time.
More frequent renewal checks. To offer a higher level of service to our valued customers, we are shortening the time between renewal checks. Renewal depends on meeting developer activity requirements and following our terms and conditions. This subscription should never be used for production purposes. Data can be removed, and membership suspended if we find violations of the terms and conditions.
Removal of the Microsoft Office 365 E3 Developer offer. We’re finishing the process for removal of the original Office 365 E3 developer offer. If you are one of our first developer program members and you are still using the old subscription, you must migrate to a new paid plan before April 1, 2024. Compare Microsoft 365 Plans | Microsoft 365.
Early access to new and improved services. Have you been caught off guard by a feature update or code change in your production tenant? The developer program is switching to preview mode. Coming soon, you can preview features in the Microsoft 365 Developer E5 subscription. This change will give you early access to updates and new features to test existing solutions, plus an opportunity to provide feedback to the product team to help reduce disruption before the change is generally available.
For more information about the Secure Future Initiative, see the following:
- Announcing Microsoft Secure Future Initiative to advance security engineering | Microsoft Security Blog
- Microsoft Built-In Security – Secure Platforms | Microsoft
Microsoft 365 developer research panel
We are creating a research panel of Microsoft 365 developers who can help guide us and influence the program development. By joining, you can help us determine and prioritize upcoming features, share your challenges, review design prototypes, and offer suggestions for program improvement. When you join the panel, we’ll reach out to you to share designs and a variety of studies to get your feedback.
As part of the research panel, you will receive invitations to participate in user research studies. You can decide how often you want to participate and which studies to do. You can leave the panel at any time.
Join the Microsoft 365 developer research panel today!
Follow us on X (Twitter) / @Microsoft365Dev and subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date on the latest developer news and announcements.
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156 comments
please i need assistant as am having error “Thank you for joining. You don’t current qualify for a Microsoft 365 Developer Program sandbox subscription”
Me too
I am CCIE certified (CCIE Collaboration #51697), and I’ve been working on Cisco voice and collaboration technology for a long period of time. Recently, I’ve realized that Microsoft Collaboration is playing a vital role in the industry. Therefore, I’ve decided to learn more about it. However, when I tried to create a Sandbox account for Office 365, I encountered an issue. The system displayed a message stating, ‘Thank you for joining. You don’t currently qualify for a Microsoft 365 Developer Program sandbox subscription.’ This limitation hinders my ability to research the product effectively. Could you please advise me on a solution?”
I have a VS enterprise subscription and a MS365 dev tenant. The VS enterprise subscription has been newly generated instead of being renewed due to a contract agreement change with MS.
Now my M365 dev tenant points to an inactive VS enterprise subscription and i am not able to link my M365 dev tenant to my new VS enterprise subscription.
Any help appreciated, thanks !
Please reach out to dxipsup.microsoft.com with details and we can help with this issue.
Thank you for the updates. Do we have an ETA of when the sandbox will be made available to US based devs again?
Hello, today when I opened the dashboard of my Instant Sandbox subscription, I found that the website did not load properly. It displayed the message, “We’re unable to sign you in with this account. The sign-in was unsuccessful. For details, see the Microsoft 365 Developer Program FAQ. Code: 41102.”Additionally, I noticed that the original 25 licenses for the E5 subscription have dropped to 0, but I haven’t received any related email notifications.
Hi, you cannot sign in to the dashboard using your *.onmicrosoft.com account. You should sign in using the email you used to join the program. It should be something like “yourname(at)mycompany.com” or “yourname(at)personalemail.com”.
Hello,
i was working on the dev tenant to develop and test automation tasks.
Recently i was working on conditional access rules automation and i locked myself out.
While i am waiting for Microsoft Support to have access again to my dev tenant i was going to create a new one to be able to hold the project timeline.
But now i know, that the registration for the M365 DEV Subscription is currently closed.
Now i have some questions:
1. Is there any timline, when the registration for the M365 DEV Subscription will be restored?
2. Will current DEV Subscriptions still working?
3. Will Microsoft help to get access again to my tenant, even it is an dev tenant?
Best regards
Although I had not had this work previously on a developer tenancy, you may find you can sign up for a 1 month trial of a licence sku. For example I was able to apply for the Business Premium trial under “Purchase Services”.
I have not historically been able to sign up for trials when in a developer tenancy so perhaps someone a MS had the foresight to although this to allow for the cutover to a new developer process (if there is to be one).
Accessing your tenant – like resetting MFA, etc. should work the same for your dev tenant as your enterprise or personal subscription. There is nothing unique about resetting your account, etc. for a developer subscription. So, Microsoft Support should be able to help you. That said, I know this is a significant pain point for our members. We have this issue on our list for investigation to see if there is something we can do to make things easier for our program members.
See the update above (just published today) about program changes.
I have seen multiple comments regarding the Developer Program being disabled.
Does that mean even if we have a Developer who is interested in joining with an active Visual Studio Professional License they will not be able to partake in the Developer Program at this time?
We don’t mind paying for the service, just unsure of what specific licensing we might need to get our Developers started.
Thanks,
Erik
I can confirm that you cannot sign-up even with a VS license. I have VS Enterprise.
Do you know what channel your license is? Volume License, retail, or Azure/Cloud?
We are in the process of reviewing the entire set of Visual Studio products to determine if we should change this list. Currently, access to the Microsoft 365 E5 developer subscription is a benefit provided by the following Visual Studio SKUs:
Visual Studio Enterprise Not for Resale ENT-NFR
Visual Studio Enterprise ENT-RETAIL
Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN (Bizspark) GSP-RTL-0001
Visual Studio Enterprise MDN-ESD-000001
Visual Studio Professional with MSDN MDN-SDF-000001
Visual Studio Enterprise MPSA-ESD-000001
Visual Studio Professional with MSDN MPSA-SDF-000001
Visual Studio Professional with MSDN PRO-RETAIL
Visual Studio Enterprise- annual VSE-ANU-0001
Visual Studio Enterprise with GitHub VSE-GIT-000001
Visual Studio Professional – annual VSP-ANU-0001
Visual Studio Professional with GitHub VSP-GIT-000001
Visual Studio Enterprise (FTE) X-RTL-000038
MCT Software & Services X-RTL-000207
Why is Visual Studio Enterprise MPN not on this list? As an MSP, we do Microsoft’s dirty work both selling subscriptions and providing tier 1+ support for hundreds of users…and we can’t have a developer environment for testing issues/solutions?
If Microsoft comes out with a new feature, we can’t test it in our or our clients’ production environments. Does Microsoft not want us to sell its products to our clients?
Note: as mentioned by at least one other poster, logging in with a regular M365 account is producing an error message, even after granting permissions/consent for the “DevBlogs_Prod_3” Enterprise Application. I’m currently using Google to login just to make this comment, which is pretty ironic.
@ATG Office – I am attempting to collaborate with the Visual Studio team to verify and hopefully expand the supported list.
it is really unfortunate that the Developer program is closed, I wanted to joint but it already closed
Hello, I can’t find the sandbox panel in my recently registered e5 developer account. What’s the problem
Hi,
I need to perform some test but upon registering I am receiving this “Thank you for joining. You don’t current qualify for a Microsoft 365 Developer Program sandbox subscription.”
Help would be appreciated.
Thank you
Hey Shujaat,
This may come as a surprise to you given how poorly it is being communicated, or rather, the fact that it isn’t being communicated on at all, but it is currently not possible to create a developer tenant. We were told a few weeks about a month ago, and the automated replies that I have gotten have said that they are working on a “quick” short term solution, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. The PM in charge of this seems to have gone radio silent. Heres to hoping thats because they are just so darn busy working on a solution.
I appreciate that everyone is hoping for updates more frequently. It’s a balancing act. I’m curious for suggestions about how to manage communication and I’m open to feedback.
Is it better to add a comment that says – no update yet? Or should I wait until I have concrete information to convey? Personally, I believe that to retain your trust is to ensure words and actions are in alignment, so don’t overpromise when we don’t have a high confidence. Don’t commit to something we don’t have real commitment lined up, etc.
Well, I can’t speak for everyone, but so far words and actions haven’t been in alignment, and the trust has already been broken. The website isn’t even updated to reflect any of these “updates”, and the communications have been all over the place and have not aligned with what is being provided to everyone.
“We are piloting a new verification process now and hope to roll it out in the next two-three weeks on the site or sooner. After joining the program, this new process allows customers to request a tenant, go through a validation process, and then receive an invitation. We’ll announce when we roll this process out on the blog. Your frustration, your desire to leverage the program for learning and development, the urgency – we hear it. We feel it in our guts. We are working as quickly as we can to get things working for you.”
Nowhere in the above communication did you say that the program would be cut off for what I have to imagine is a very large percentage of users who want to learn and grow on your platform, and it was over a month before we got an update of any kind. You stopped responding to people for a very long period of time, so how else are we supposed to feel/think? We literally just want to use your platform. There are Learn articles that direct you to create a development tenant. Nobody that I reach out to from Microsoft outside of this forum seems to know what is going on. This problem has been unaligned from the start. We are hoping for more frequent updates because this is literally our livelihood.
Your feelings are valid Kody. Thank you for sharing your perspective. It helps me to improve my messaging.
In piloting the process, we found that we can’t make it generally available because, at this time, we must limit access to customers with established ties to Microsoft. Consequently, we decided that making the validation request form generally available will only result in more customer frustration as most will be rejected. There is a request process in place for the customer segments mentioned above (specific VS subscriptions, specific partner types). It begins with reaching out to their account manager.
I and Kalyani, my new counterpart in India, are working to find a way forward for students and independent learners and other people without established identities that minimizes security risks but that is neither fully designed nor committed. This is why we are not giving an ETA or confirming whether the program will be more generally available in the future.
The Learn content and other documentation is being updated as quickly as possible. This was not an expected program change but one made in direct response to changing conditions. Lack of response is generally because we’re waiting to have a meaningful update.
Thanks for engaging with me.