Microsoft Office 365 and other Cloud Services are becoming more prevalent.  It’s becoming more important than ever for MSP’s to update their tool kit and start offering access to these services as well as a knowledge base on how to migrate to these services.

Despite how simple it’s proclaimed to be there are a lot of moving parts if you want to offer seamless services to the end user.

  • Azure AD Services/DirSync
  • Single Sign On (SSO)
  • Migrating Exchange
  • Hybrid Exchange
  • Click-To-Run Microsoft Office 2016 Deployment
  • SharePoint
  • Yammer
  • Unified Messaging

To make things more complicated in a VDI environment you can only deploy Office Professional Plus but this doesn’t give the user access to O365 Mailbox so you must also assign at least an Essentials license.  Yes, that’s two licenses per VDI desktop user.

It’s critical to know exactly what you want the end result to look like before you even start.  With the way things are going with Microsoft the option to purchase Office licensing is going to disappear.  It’s even likely that eventually your SQL and Exchange servers will only be offered as hosted services – but hopefully that’s a ways away yet.

As we move through doing migrations I’ll update this new category with instructions on how to plan and implement deployments.