lately I've been receiving numerous inquiries from my students and other Microsoft 365 developers regarding how to access the free Microsoft 365 developer tenants that are referenced in various Microsoft learning modules Microsoft's documentation and in my classes to be honest since its Inception the Microsoft 365 developer program and these free developer tenants have been the preferred method for Learning and developing custom solutions they provide an excellent starting point for developers to build and test Microsoft 365 Solutions however some changes have occurred within the Microsoft 365 developer program in the recent months and it's been challenging to get a comprehensive understanding of what transpired what's changed and what the current status of the program is and those coveted developer tenants and what can we anticipate in the future that's what I'm going to cover in this video today and check out my by-weekly newsletter where I talk about the same topics and share the most important news in the Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure space for full stack developers delivered straight to your mmox hi I'm Andrew and if this topic interests you please hit that like button below the video it helps me reach more people just like you and grow this Channel and if you're new here consider subscribing to my Channel with that button below the video to see when I publish more videos for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure full stack developers just like you now let me start with a recap of what the Microsoft 365 developer program is and those free Microsoft 365 developer tenants the Microsoft 365 developer program launched in November of 2020 and by March of 2021 it began offering developers a free Microsoft 365 tenant this tenant was also referred to as a Sandbox subscription the tenant included sample data and multiple user licenses for developers to create and test solutions for Microsoft 365 now provided the tenants were used for only development purposes and they weren't misused Microsoft would automatically renew them annually now since their introduction I've advised all my students to join the developer program and create a developer tenant to use as a hosted developer environment for testing their Microsoft 365 Solutions it is a great option for Learning and testing as it's free and it's identical to a commercial Microsoft 365 tenant there is no difference between a developer tenant and a commercial tenant except that the developer tenants they're free they expire after a year and they're monitored to ensure that they're used for development purposes and if they are they're automatically renewed if not they expire after a certain amount of time however things changed earlier this year in January of 2024 Microsoft abruptly ceased creating developer tenants for users which led to a surge of errors and considerable confusion developers started to see the following error when they tried to create a new developer tenant it said you don't qualify for a developer Microsoft 365 developer program sandbox subscription as you can see from this screenshot from one user so what happened well in February Microsoft updated a blog post from that they originally posted from late January but it didn't really give us any specifics all that really said was quote at this time we are limiting access to the Microsoft 365 developer subscription to developers indor organizations with active subscriptions to visual studio Enterprise now in the next section I'll EXP explain why they took this action but essentially they needed to secure their systems temporarily while they strengthened them as a result you couldn't create a Microsoft 365 developer tenant or a samx tenant through the Microsoft 365 developer program again this all started in January of 2024 but why before 2024 all you needed to sign up for the Microsoft 365 developer program was an email address this could be created quickly using Gmail outlook.com or any of these other hosted email services but the issue with this approach is it didn't validate the identity of the person that was signing up consider this anyone or even some nefarious organization could create numerous bogus emails and sign up to the Microsoft 365 developer program obtain a Sandbox tenant and then send out millions of emails because these were real tenants even if Microsoft detected this activity they couldn't identify who the responsible party was that was doing it m Microsoft needed to ensure that they could validate the identity of every person receiving one of these tenants now you might wonder how does Microsoft Azure do this Microsoft Azure provides developers with $200 in credits to create resources and test out Microsoft Azure however they control fraud and misuse by requiring a credit card from the user as proof of identity and this prevents malicious organizations from setting up numerous Azure subscriptions to for example run virtual machines for crypto mining or to establish a bot farm for a potential dods attack so the Microsoft 365 developer program they required a method to validate the identities of users that were signing up for the program and there are both short-term and long-term solutions for this issue a currently the short-term solution provides several ways to obtain a Microsoft 365 developer sandbox tenant so option one is as I previously mentioned you can get a tenant if you have an active Visual Studio Enterprise subscription a can get from visual studio. microsoft.com subscriptions option two you can participate in one of the Microsoft AI Cloud partner programs it's available from partner.microsoft.com partner Center you can contact your Microsoft partner to be added to an allow list to receive these developer subscriptions now this includes groups like the isv success program the solutions partner program specialization experts managing Partners managed partners and and Premier or unified support plan members now the third option gave us another way to get a tenant and that was by just purchasing a license such as an E3 license or a business premium license you can then use this Microsoft 365 tenant for your own development purposes so why did Microsoft take this action now although Microsoft hasn't explicitly stated a reason for the strict measures that were implemented in January the timing seems more than coincidental they even touched on this exact topic at the in the second keynote um of the build conference in May of 2024 it's almost certain that this was in response of the Swift adoption and deployment of Microsoft zero trust policy which was a countermeasure to the company being compromised during the midnight blizzard attack you can learn more about midnight blizzard the Russian state sponsored actor known as nobelium uh from these Microsoft security Response Center articles so I have one here from the Microsoft actions following the attack by the nation state actor midnight blizzard and then also an update on Microsoft's actions following uh the attack by the nation state active midnight blizzard both of these links will be in the description below so what does this imply for the future now Microsoft fully acknowledges that this is an issue and its impact on customers particularly those who are new students and developers testing Solutions on Microsoft 365 the company recently stated that a solution is in the works with an estimated implementation time of around September 2024 and until then options for obtaining a free developer account they're pretty limited I've outlined those three different options already in this video Yeah it stinks and I get how customers are impacted and I get why they're complaining but do keep this in mind that for the most part the cost of the tools that we use to create solutions for Microsoft 365 they're very affordable or they're nearly free other than a computer and an internet connection which you probably already had even if you weren't into devel Vel ER you can build solutions for Microsoft 365 using SharePoint framework Solutions Microsoft teams apps and so much more for almost nothing now I'm not dismissing the impact this change is having but I do want to keep it in perspective I mean a single Microsoft 365 business basic license is $72 a year just $6 per user per month with an annual commitment but a Microsoft 365 business premium license is just 26 $64 per year that's $22 per month per user with an annual commitment so let's just keep it in perspective but I am sure looking forward to those sandbox tenants coming back is this affecting you how so are you not able to get a tenant in one of those three options to get a Microsoft 365 tenant that I mentioned earlier in this video If you like this video or found it useful please give me a thumbs up it helps me grow this channel by reaching more people just like you and if you haven't already subscribe by Smashing that subscribe button below the video so you'll see when I publish more videos for full stack developers on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Ash and let me know if you want to see more videos about the Microsoft 365 developer program I'm Andrew Connell thanks for watching and I hope to see you in my next video