Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Stuck trying to migrate Trial instance to Production, looking for help!

Hi,

About 5 weeks ago I set up a Dynamic 365 Enterprise 30-day free trial with a customer of mine to get them started with Sales/CRM, with an eye on also using Field Service and Marketing down the road. (They're a small business but Field Service is not part of Business Central.) The trial itself went OK, but it's now over and we've been trying to convert it to paid production for days to no avail. The overall experience has been extremely frustrating, and I'm otherwise very familiar with O365 / Power BI / SharePoint / Azure, so it's not like we're new and clueless with Microsoft cloud products.

My customer bought a Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Plan Enterprise Edition license, which I can see is Active under O365 Admin Center > Billing > Subscriptions. That license is assigned to my customer's O365 account, which I can see under Users > Active users. That account is Global Administrator at the O365 level, and System Administrator in the D365 trial instance ("Promote to Admin" as discussed here). I would think we've crossed the Ts and dotted the Is.

Now, under Dynamics 365 Administration Center > Instances, I can see the Trial instance. There is a big blue/green "Convert to Paid" button, which does nothing. My client tried it, Microsoft support tried it remotely, I tried it via shared credentials (I even did the whole log out, delete cookies, log in routine just in case). This button has been clicked dozens of times by three people, no dice! I googled around and found no help page about this specific situation. During the trial we've spent several hours working on customization (fields, forms, options, setting up a third-party mapping app...) and loading data, which we do not want to lose by moving to production.

I tried creating a Production Instance, thinking that maybe the instance needed to be provisioned first. That didn't work either, instead the result is that the Convert To Paid button says Buy Now, presumably because there's no unused production license in that case. So I switched the production instance to sandbox, which turned the button back to Convert To Paid, which still doesn't work, as per the screenshot below. I feel there must be something obvious to do that we're missing, I've explored the trial's admin back-end looking for a clue, but I'm now at a loss what else to try, so I would greatly appreciate any help!

PS: if Microsoft staff is reading this, I'm sorry to report that your support has been completely useless to resolve this so far. We've interacted with people who barely speak English and clearly don't know the system. I've been working with SaaS for more than a decade (besides Microsoft, I've been working extensively with Salesforce, Intercom, Recurly, Trello, etc. etc.) and never ran into something even remotely as hard to do relative to how simple it should be. Every other SaaS free trial I've ever run was turned to production simply by paying! And I've never run into a tech support experience, from the user interface to the skill set, that were so poor.

My client is about ready to throw the towel on D365, which I think would be a shame as I'd rather set up an integrated suite through the whole customer lifecycle from leads to quotes to work orders to invoices. I need to resolve this soon to salvage the project, otherwise we'll probably try something else.

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