Deployment phases of Office 365

 

Applies to: Office 365 Enterprise

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When you plan to deploy Office 365 in a large organization, it's recommended that you plan the project according to the following phases. These are the phases we use with customers who are deployed by the Office 365 Onboarding Center.

Project Kickoff	The deployment project officially begins and the project team members begin work. From this date, the project owner coordinates activities and provides the project sponsor with regular status updates.
Assess Phase	During this phase, the project team determines any areas of the existing environment that should be updated or modified to ensure that Office 365 integrates with existing systems and meets user requirements. The outcome of this phase is a readiness checklist identifying any detailed risks and issues.
Remediate Phase	Any risks or issues identified in the assess phase mitigated by the project team to ensure smooth deployment. At the completion of this phase, the project owner confirms that core enablement tasks are ready to begin.
Enable Phase	Identity management integration takes place and users are provisioned so that they can begin production use of Office 365. Administrator roles are assigned to operations staff and initial workloads are configured for first use.
Migrate Phase	Mailbox data including email, calendar and contact information are migrated to Office 365. In this phase, a migration schedule should be prepared and the order and timing of mailboxes should be determined.
Project Completion	The deployment project is considered complete when all identified users have access to Office 365 and all in-scope mailboxes have been migrated to Office 365. The project sponsor confirm that the project is complete.
User Acceptance Testing	Users confirm acceptance of the deployment.