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Office 365 provides the best cloud productivity experience by giving businesses new ways to help their people to collaborate, gain valuable business insights and ultimately get things done. As a cloud based service customers can move to Office 365 faster than a traditional on-premises solution and we’re focused on making that transition to the cloud as fast and seamless as possible.
Continuous improvement of the Office 365 deployment experience
Last year as part of that commitment we introduced FastTrack which encompasses our onboarding methodology, tools, and process to streamline deployments. FastTrack has helped thousands of customers, together with their partners, move to Office 365. While feedback has been very positive, we’re continuing to identify best practices and we believe that providing support directly from the Office 365 Service team during the critical phases of on-boarding can shorten the time for deployment. The result is the Office 365 FastTrack Onboarding Center.
Announcing the Office 365 FastTrack Onboarding Center
The Office 365 FastTrack Onboarding Center delivers a quick and predictable way to get started and deployed in your organization. The Onboarding Center is available to customers and their preferred partners. This new benefit is included at no charge to all new customers purchasing 150 seats or more of a qualified license purchase. The Microsoft Office 365 Onboarding Center, included as part of the service, will support the provisioning and configuration of Office 365 workloads including Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Office 365 Pro Plus, and Yammer. We will ensure that the Office 365 service is provisioned and ready for use in your organization.
Key features of the Office 365 FastTrack Onboarding Center:
- Direct remote assistance provided by an Office 365 onboarding expert who will assist with critical onboarding activities working with customers and partners.
- Robust suite of automated checks and configuration tools to enable tasks such as current state assessment, identity management, and domain configuration.
- Onboarding support will be available in the following languages: English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
- Available worldwide starting September 1, 2014.
Once your organization is on-boarded, you will want to get your users up and running as quickly as possible. Depending on the Office 365 workload, additional activities may be required such as email or document migration. In order to help customers through this phase we have created the Office 365 Adoption Offer.
Announcing the Office 365 adoption offer, for a limited time
From September 1, 2014 to March 31, 2015 this offer is available for all new Office 365 customers that buy at least 150 qualifying Office 365 SKUs during the offer time period. Through this offer, customers may opt for one of the following benefits:
Adoption activities—delivered by your preferred Office 365 Cloud Deployment Partner or Cloud Productivity Competency partner.
Microsoft will provide a limited set of funds for your preferred partner to assist you with driving adoption of Office 365 in your organization. You may use these funds to have your partner deliver a variety of adoption activities in order to get your users up and running.
For Office 365 Adoption Offer eligibility details terms, and conditions please see Office 365 Adoption Offer.
Email Migration offer—delivered remotely by Microsoft.
Microsoft will work with you to remotely migrate all of your purchased mailboxes from the following source environments:
- Exchange Server 2003 or above
- Lotus Domino 7.0.3 or above
- Google Gmail
- IMAP accessible environments
The email migration offer is available to customers and partners as part of the adoption offer. Microsoft delivers the migration service staffed by experts that will work with you to ensure that you get your users mail migrated over seamlessly. For Email migration offer details terms, and conditions please see Email Migration offer.
Ensuring that customers realize the value of Office 365 in their organizations quickly while providing a smooth onboarding experience to their users is a top priority for the Office 365 team. We are excited to make the Office 365 FastTrack Onboarding Center and the Office 365 Adoption Offer available to qualified new customers starting today. For more details see Office 365 Deployment Center.
