Active Office 365 Developer Subscription using MSDN subscription benefit

Our company started Office 365 hybrid approach with SharePoint on-premises and it’s extremely helpful if our developers could have an Office 365 developer site for development. I was in SharePoint Saturday in San Diego and found that as a Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN, Visual Studio Premium with MSDN, BizSpark, or MCT Developer Software & Services subscriber, you’re eligible for a single-user one year free Office 365 Developer Subscription.

Use your Office 365 Developer Site as a development and testing environment for creating apps for Office and SharePoint. Shorten your setup time and start creating, testing, and deploying your apps today. And by deploying the "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools to your Developer Site, you also get a head start on developing SharePoint-hosted apps, and apps for Office documents and mail items, right in the browser.

Best of all, signing up for an Office 365 Developer Subscription enables you to publish your apps to the Office Store. Make your free and paid apps available to the hundreds of millions of Office and SharePoint users worldwide.

Your Office 365 Developer Subscription includes all the tools and resources you need to start building and testing apps right now:

• SharePoint Online Developer Site, customized for creating and testing apps
• Access to "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools, to create your first apps right within the browser
• Exchange Online 2013 server
• Microsoft Seller Dashboard Account

Here are the detailed steps for you to enable the Office 365 subscription using MSDN subscription.

The first step is to sign up for an Office 365 DeveloperSubscription if you do not have one already and set up your tools and environment. Check this article for the following four major steps.

• Start with an Office 365 Developer Site (a SharePoint site preconfigured for apps)
• Sign up for an Office 365 Developer Site
• Install "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools to your Developer Site
• Create your own apps 

The second step is to active Office 365 Developer Subscription from MSDNsubscription site. You click the following Activate Office 365 Developer Subscription link and following the instructions.

The third step is to convert Office 365 Developer Preview to paid subscriptionusing MSDN benefit. You could login to Office 365 and edit user. Add the license as in the following screenshot.

Make sure you click the license and select "SharePoint Online for Developer" as the following screenshot.

You might still see several links including "NewsFeed", "OneDrive", and Sites" might be disabled as in the following screenshot.

The workaround is you would need to use the different URLs to access SharePoint online.  

• Newsfeed: https://[Tenant]-my.sharepoint.com/default.aspx
• OneDrive: https://[Tenant]-my.sharepoint.com/personal/[user]_[domain]_com/Documents/Forms/All.aspx
• Sites: https://[Tenant]-my.sharepoint.com/personal/[user]_[domain]_com/Social/Sites.aspx

In my case, here is the URL I’m using that have all the links enabled.

https://myqualcomm-my.sharepoint.com

Now, you can provision a develop site for O365 development. Let's have some fun now!