How To Get Microsoft Office 365 For Your School For Free (Part 3 of 3)
The last two steps in claiming your free A1 license for Office 365 are:
- Confirm school eligibility
- Change from A5 trial license to A1 free license
Once you have verified that you own your school domain, Microsoft will let you know that it will take about 2 weeks to confirm your school’s eligibility. During this time, you will have trial access, so you will be able to get started right away. Within 2 weeks or so, Microsoft will check your website among other things and let you know that you qualify. If for example, you are not an educational institution, such as a consulting company or a tutoring company, you may not qualify. If you want to expedite the process, you can call customer service and verify your eligibility via phone. Customer service is much better these days because they have a call back system, this enables them to call you back at a later time rather than being on hold for hours.
Once your eligibility is confirmed, you may receive the below email:
Once your eligibility is established, you can purchase or receive EDU licenses. The pricing is different for business licenses as opposed to education licenses.
The last step is to transfer your A5 trial license to the A1 free license. In order to do this, you need to go into the admin portal, go to ‘subscriptions’ (where you will see the trial A5 subscription being active), and then click on ‘Add subscription’ at the top right.
In the list of options that appear, you will need to select Office 365 A1 for faculty and Office 365 A1 for students. Once you have selected them, select ‘Pay for full year’ and then add to cart or checkout if you have both licenses for faculty and students.
Once you have placed them in the cart, you will need to put in your credit card details (don’t worry, there will be no charge) and place your order. This completes the purchase of the free A1 license for Office 365.
Once the purchase is completed, the admin account will receive the email below:
Once this is done, you can apply the unlimited A1 license to teacher and student accounts based on their institutional emails.
Any comments or questions are much appreciated.
