Get ready for Office 365!

Planning Services partners may now deliver Office 365 migration guidance as part of the Planning Services engagements. To help you prepare for providing expertise on Office 365 migrations, we have developed partner readiness materials and gathered various Office 365 training resources.

Office 365 “Ignite in a Box” Kit
The Office 365 “Ignite in a Box” kit is a very valuable set of presentations and hands-on lab materials that can help partners deliver in-depth Office 365 technical content to customers. In addition, the kit provides a set of downloadable Hyper-V images that are used with the hands-on labs and Office 365.  Also available is a set of recorded sessions of the Office 365 Ignite content to help you prepare to deliver the presentations contained in the Office 365 “Ignite in a Box” kit. Note: you will need to tailor the agenda to your customer’s requirements and the engagement scope.

Other Office 365 Resources
For access to Office 365 customer presentations, technical information and training along with downloadable recorded sessions, visit the QuickStart Online Services site, which is part of the Microsoft Partner Network.

A key Office 365 technical document that partners should thoroughly review in preparation for any Office 365 engagement, including Planning Services engagements, is the Microsoft Office 365 Beta Deployment Guide for Enterprises (often referred to as the “MODG”). It is also available for download here.

Partners providing Office 365 migration guidance should also thoroughly review the Office 365 Beta Service Descriptions. The features provisioned and available to customers in the Office 365 online service is different from what is available in the underlying Microsoft technologies which provide the foundation for the services. It is important for partners and customers to review the services descriptions in detail in order to fully understand what they are getting (and not getting) when they migrate to Office 365.