So I discovered something that, if I'm right, represents a monumental error on Microsoft's part that deserves to be broadcast because of how damaging it is to organizations attempting to transition to the new business model.
The bottom line is this: If your organization users "Self-Service" signed up for PowerApps Trials, you will not be able to assign them Per App passes, Ever, or until Microsoft fixes it.
I think this is because the only way for Expired Trial Users to get PowerApps features back is if they buy (or are assigned) a full PowerApps license. But Per App Passes aren't true licenses! So if any of your users have expired Trials, they get "Your trial is expired" no matter what you do.
Am I wrong? Gosh I hope I'm wrong. That would be a terrible, ridiculous, headline-making oversight.
Here is Microsoft's article explaining that you have no control over PowerApps Self-Service Trials: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/signup-question-and-answer
Users who sign up for a trial license from within Power Apps don't appear in the Office 365 admin portal as Power Apps trial users (unless they have another license to Office 365, model-driven apps in Dynamics 365, such as Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service, or Power Apps).
And:
Any individual can try out the features of Microsoft Power Apps for 30 days, and incur no costs as outlined in the How do users sign up for Power Apps section. This option is available to any user in a tenant and cannot be disabled by an admin. After the user's trial expires the user will lose access to Power Apps capabilities.
If a person signs up for a 30 day trial of Microsoft Power Apps , and you choose to not support them inside of your organization, they can in no way incur costs to your company. When an individual signs up for Microsoft Power Apps, that is a relationship between that individual and Microsoft directly, like any many public cloud services from Microsoft, such as Bing, Wunderlist, OneDrive or Outlook.com, and does not in any way imply that the service is provided by your organization.
So let's recap:
- I have 65 users who are on expired (or expiring) PowerApps trials that I have no administrative control over because of Microsoft's controversial PowerApps Self Signup policy.
- Those expired trials are permanent and neither I (nor even Microsoft?) can administratively remove them.
- Those expired trials are blocking our Per App passes.
- My company paid thousands for 65 Per App licenses that are now as useful to us as an accordion on a deer hunt.
I have been wrestling with Microsoft support on this issue for a month. The one guy who was helping us just "peace-outed" for the Thanksgiving week and now I'm beyond angry.
