Trial conversion and licence changes on a live tenant

What it does

The Field Service trial is a 30-day evaluation on its own tenant that Power Platform deletes when it expires. Converting to paid means buying licences, applying them to a tenant and publishing an environment to production — it is not a switch that preserves the trial you've been building in.

Key facts

The trial runs 30 days and can be extended once, for another 30, from the admin centre.
It expires early after 14 consecutive days of inactivity, and an expired trial cannot be reactivated. You can sign up again, but you start from nothing.
At expiry, Power Platform deletes the environment. There is no manual reset and no grace recovery.
One active trial per app at a time, and each trial sits on a different tenant and URL. Trial data isn't shared between Dynamics 365 apps.
Unlimited users can be added to a trial environment, provided they have Microsoft 365 accounts and security roles. That makes trials tempting for workshops and dangerous as a build environment.
Converting to paid: buy licences (credit card, volume licensing or an enterprise agreement), apply them to the tenant, then publish the environment to production.
Sample data is not removed for you. Configuration and test data have to be cleaned by hand, and Microsoft's own recommendation is to create a fresh production environment and migrate the configuration you want to keep.
Capacity gates conversion. If the relevant Dataverse pool has less than 1 GB available, converting a trial to paid is one of the environment operations that gets blocked outright.
Assigning and removing licences is a Microsoft 365 admin center operation, per user or per group. It has no Dataverse-side cleanup attached to it.

When to use / skip

Use the trial for what it is: a demo and evaluation surface. It's genuinely good for showing a client the schedule board, the mobile app and the work order lifecycle with sample data already loaded, without touching anything they own.

Do not build in it. Every project that treats a trial as phase-one dev discovers the 14-day inactivity rule during a quiet fortnight over Christmas, or hits the 60-day ceiling mid-UAT. If the client is committed enough to configure, they're committed enough to buy a small number of licences and stand up a proper environment with sandbox and production separated.

The licence-change path in the other direction — pulling licences at renewal, downgrading users, or moving people between full and Contractor — deserves the same discipline. It's easy to do and it leaves a mess behind that nobody notices for months.

Configuration decisions

Whether the trial is on the client's tenant or a demo tenant. On their tenant it drags in their identity, their admins and their security review; on yours, nothing you build there ever moves.
Whether you convert or rebuild. Microsoft's advice is to rebuild, and on anything beyond a demo that's the right call.
How configuration crosses the gap: a managed or unmanaged solution export, or a documented reconfiguration. Data almost never crosses.
Which environments exist at go-live and what type each one is — production, sandbox, developer — and who is allowed to create more.
The joiner-mover-leaver process for licences, including what happens on the Dataverse side when someone leaves.
Whether licence assignment is group-based, which is the only approach that survives a field workforce with real churn.

Gotchas

Removing a licence does not disable or tidy the Dataverse user. The user record, its security roles, its ownership of records and its bookable resource all remain. The person just stops being able to write to restricted tables, silently.
A bookable resource whose user has lost their licence keeps appearing on the schedule board with working hours, and dispatchers will keep booking work to them.
Trial environments die on inactivity, not just on the calendar. Two quiet weeks and the demo you promised to show the steering group is gone.
Sample data in a converted trial looks like real data three months later. If you convert rather than rebuild, purge it deliberately and record that you did.
Low Dataverse capacity blocks the conversion itself. Check the capacity page before promising a conversion date.
Changing a user between full Field Service and Contractor is an admin centre action with no in-app confirmation of what they lost. Test the affected user's actual journey afterwards, don't assume.

Consultant notes

Say up front, in writing, that the trial is a demo environment and nothing built there is deliverable. It's a conversation that costs five minutes now and a fortnight later.
Get the client to buy a small licence block early — enough for the project team — so the build starts in a real environment with a real ALM story.
When licences are pulled at leaver time, make sure the process also disables the Dataverse user and deactivates or reassigns the bookable resource. Nobody's HR offboarding does this by default.
Before go-live, reconcile three lists: assigned licences, enabled Dataverse users, and active bookable resources. Every mismatch is either a cost or a scheduling bug.
Detail on how a specific licence change affects use rights sits in the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide rather than on Learn. Point the client's procurement team at it directly.

Worth another look if Microsoft changes the trial length or ever offers a supported in-place trial-to-production conversion.