Best practices: Focus areas for assessment
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?