Deep Dive Into Office 365 Deployment (Part 3)

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In part 1 of this article series, I explained a little on Microsoft Cloud Services and customer requirements. The customer would like to avail Office 365 services such as Email, Lync, SharePoint, and dynamic CRM and also be able to build a Hybrid cloud environment. The requirements from the customer indicates that the customer should be able to host users at both on-premise and cloud and also plan to keep Exchange and SharePoint services on-premise to build a Hybrid cloud environment. By taking a close look at the requirements document, explained in the Part 1 of this article series, my first task was to do an assessment of the customer production environment. I explained the results of the assessment in Part two of this article series.
From this point onwards, we are going to take a steady approach that will help us build the foundation for deploying Office 365 components. We are going to explain several stages that we will be used throughout the deployment of Office 365 components to meet customer’s requirements. The stages that we are going to discuss throughout the rest of the article series are mentioned below:
- Stage 1: Mapping Business Requirements to Office 365 Services
- Stage 2: Proposal Summary
- Stage 3: Acceptance Criteria
- Stage 4: Planning Phase
- Stage 5: Deployment Phase
Now that you have done an assessment of the customer environment, it is time to map common customer business requirements to the Office 365 Services. It is imperative that you go through each of the requirements highlighted by the customer and then map to Office 365 services.
Stage 1: Mapping Business Requirements to Office 365 Services
If you take a close look at the Office 365 offering, you know that the requirements highlighted by the customer are achievable by using services offered by the Office 365. The below table explains the customer requirement and the Office 365 services you can use to meet the requirement.
Customer Requirement | Solution | Remark |
We need to sync our on-premise users to the Office 365. However, it is important to note that some of the users need to be controlled by using the Office 365 security policies and some users will be controlled using the security policies defined in on-premise Active Directory. For example, we would like to use the password policies defined in On-premise Active Directory to meet compliance and regulatory requirements. |
Customer can continue to use Password Policies defined at On-Premise Active Directory.
Use Exchange Server Deployment Assistance to plan for Hybrid connectivity.
AD RMS can be migrated easily with a little planning.
Now that you have evaluated all the requirements highlighted by the customer, go back to the customer with a proposal summary that explains the overall deployment approach you are going to use to meet all of the requirements. It is also necessary to call out any issues and concerns during the acceptance criteria phase.
In the next part, we are going to explain the basic steps for creating a proposal summary and acceptance criteria documents.
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If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to: