Inspired by my new job at Best Practice, I have been looking at Microsoft 365 Dataverse and model-driven power apps as a potential replacement for TournamentCompare development (and possibly others).
Although it looked like you could sign up for a free community / developer plan, it didn't like my hotmail address. Digging deeper it looked like all I had to do was have a custom domain, so I set up a dev account on tournamentcompare.com, but it still rejected stating it needed a O365 tenant (had expected such, otherwise it would have created all the back end anyway).
It turns out what I REALLY need is a developer tenant for the entire Microsoft 365 suite, which comes with 25 sample E5 licenses and a 3 month extendable trial window. Super impressed with this offering and goes along the lines of Visual Studio being offered for free too.
Initially it offered a sample userbase and SharePoint site for a trial, but since I had used the admin tools before I decided to go with the custom install and eschew the trial data, even though it warned on a possible 2 day setup timeframe. Luckily it was provisioned within a minute and sure enough, all the admin controls are available.
Checking SharePoint and it has a boilerplate communication-style site already set up and admin back end ready to go.
Jumping straight over to Power Apps and although it took a little to process, it was also provisioned and looks to be ready for development. Excellent, don't need the developer plan (kinda makes sense since I am already inside a dev plan for the entire tenant).
Popping over to Azure Active Directory and, as expected by now, it is also provisioned on a Premium P2 license. This will also allow a great sandbox for testing some of the potential dev opportunities at work (PIM springs to mind).
Overall super happy with the offering.
