Best practices: Focus areas for assessment

  • 3 minutes to read
  • Contributors
    • J Whitmarsh
    • Daniel H. Brown
    • Dave

The Best Practices Guide includes deployment recommendations and real-world examples from the Office 365 Product Group and delivery experts from Microsoft Services. For a list of all the articles, see Best practices.

This article describes the assessment focus areas for your Office 365 ProPlus deployment.

Size and distribution

  • Number of devices targeted for the deployment.

  • List of countries and regions to cover.

  • List of languages supported by central IT department.

  • Estimated number of the following:

    • Travelling users

    • Travelling users

    • Employees sharing a device (e.g. shift and factory floor workers)

IT infrastructure

  • Operating Systems (OS) supported by central IT department, if multiple (for example, Windows 7 x86 and x64).

  • Number of devices per OS type.

  • Number and type of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)s.

  • Number of mobile and fixed devices.

  • Do all devices have a common base language (e.g. en-us)?

  • Do users have administrative rights on their machines?

  • Number of the following:

    • Remote Desktops Service servers

    • Remote Desktops Service farms

    • Remote Desktops Service users

    • Static VDI clients

    • Dynamic VDI clients

  • How is software currently distributed? System Center Configuration Manager (which version, how many sites)?

  • How are clients and users managed? Active Directory Domain Service?

  • Are all devices and users located in the same Directory Service or spread across several forests (e.g. one per region)?

  • List of sites and number of targeted devices per site.

  • If planning to leverage on premises Exchange servers

    • Is it at least Exchange 2010?

    • Is Autodiscover enabled?

  • If planning to leverage on premises Lync or Skype for Business Servers, is it at least Lync 2010?

Network infrastructure

  • From a software deployment perspective, which sites:

    • Are well connected to the internal software distribution solution (e.g. System Center Configuration Manager)?

    • Are moderately well connected to the internal software distribution solution>

    • Are poorly connected to the internal software distribution solution?

  • Which sites are well connected to the internet?

  • Can the network handle the impact of the deployment and management scenarios selected?

Application landscape

  • Which versions and editions of Office are currently deployed?

  • Is there a mix in CPU architecture (Office 32-bit and 64-bit in production)?

  • How many installations of Project exist? Which version(s) and editions?

  • How many installations of Visio exist? Which version(s) and editions?

  • Is InfoPath used in production?

  • Is there a need to exclude applications from the deployment (for example, Access)?

  • Should end users be able to add applications if they were excluded to the base install (for example, Access)?

  • Is Office currently configured and managed by Group Policy settings?

  • How many Group Policy objects exist to configure the client? Are there any subsets for specific user groups?

  • What are the number of Office languages packs deployed per region?

  • Which applications are out of scope (for example, Publisher or OneDrive)?

  • Are there any known dependencies on legacy, end of life, or discontinued products (for example, Access 97)?

  • Is there a known group of users which test new releases and updated first (e.g. Application Owners, QA group, Pilot group)?

Cloud infrastructure

  • Is the Office 365 tenant configured and ready for production?

  • Are the user licenses available in the tenant? Which SKU was purchased?

  • Is identity already setup up? Which flavor (Cloud IDs, Synchronized IDs or Federated IDs)?

  • If you are using Federated IDs, which identity provider is used (for example, Active Directory Federation Services)?

  • Is the identity synchronization set up and working?

  • Are all users accounts already synchronized to the tenant?

  • Do the user accounts have the necessary Office 365 ProPlus license assigned?

  • Is the self-service Office 365 ProPlus installation from the Office 365 portal blocked today?

  • Are all URLs and IPs listed required for Office 365 whitelisted in the web proxies?

  • Is the cloud infrastructure signed off by the security and compliance department?