Office 365 offers many ways to subscribe and all sorts of licensing combinations. Whether you're a small business or an enterprise, you have a number of ways to get started. The good news is that you can start a trial subscription and always associate your long-term licenses to the trial, leveraging any method. We learned about the licensing available within the service, which should clarify how you proceed. By this point you should be deciding how these licenses fit your organization and whether you are going to sign-up directly, work with a Microsoft Deployment Partner, or engage an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft.

As we reflect on the sign up process, you can see how Microsoft designed the process  to be greatly simplified. Microsoft focused on minimizing many decision points for a trial. The fact is, it is a trial, so why complicate the sign up process more than it needs to be? Either way, in the end, your team managing and configuring the service will be required to do all the tweaking and tuning, based on business and technical decisions made within the organization.

In conclusion, you should now be ready to start getting more familiar with the service: configuring it to your specifications, starting the integration process, and finally either migrating or starting to use the service full-time. Before your trial ends, you will need to obtain or assign the licensing plan that best fits your subscription.

Now that we have established a subscription, in the next chapter we will focus on using the admin portal. We will also start walking through some key initial configuration steps.