Hey everyone! I'm diving into some Microsoft 365 certification courses and I'm really interested in setting up a sandbox environment to practice what I learn. I want to do this without piling up any unexpected charges from Microsoft. Is there a reliable way to create a sandbox without spending a ton of money?
3 Answers
You used to be able to get a developer tenant that offered 25 Developer E5 licenses. That was part of the MS900 cert course on Microsoft Learn, but it seems they may have limited access to that. Alternatively, you could grab a P1 license and an Exchange Plan 1. This setup lets you explore most of what you'd encounter in the MS900 and MS102 exams. I found it really helpful! It might also be worth buying a cheap custom domain from GoDaddy to really dive into admin, Exchange, Intune, and Entra. A little investment can go a long way in gaining hands-on experience.
We also have a free development tenant that provides about 25 licenses of different types. We use it every few months for practice and it works great!
You can always create a free tenant! It comes with some basic licenses, which should be enough for getting started. We have a dev environment tenant with about 10 M365 P2 licenses, and it costs just over $1,000 a year. That's not too bad if you're really getting into this!
Where did you sign up for it?