Prepare for setup with health, readiness, and connectivity checks

 

Applies to: Office 365

Why we recommend health, readiness, and connectivity checks

We always recommend that you run health, readiness, and connectivity checks before you set up Office 365. Here’s why:

  • Checks can find settings in your current environment that might cause problems when you start to set up or use your services.

  • If you know where the potential roadblocks are before you start, you can fix or work around them to make your deployment path easier to complete.

Things to consider

Here are a few things to know about health, readiness, and connectivity checks:

  • Your computer has to meet minimum requirements and you have to download a small app before we can run checks. Requirements are listed in the tool before you download the app and the tool will let you know if something’s missing. If you can’t meet the requirements, don’t worry, readiness checks are optional. We just think it’s a good idea.

  • The readiness checks are looking at settings in your current local network environment and anything you’ve already set up in Office 365. The checks use your credentials to make their inspection. Run the checks while connected to your current local network and logged in as an admin.

  • Outlook and computer checks run only against the computer you’re using, and don't inspect all of the computers in your environment. If some users have their computers set up differently, you may want to run these checks from more than one computer.

  • No data is stored by the readiness checks.

  • When you review the report of the check results, focus on errors. Check results are sorted into these categories:

    Passed: the setting that we checked is correct for Office 365. You might want to review passed items to see what we looked at, but these results are informational only.

    Warning: the setting that we checked won't break anything, but isn't optimized for Office 365. You can review the results to see if this is an important setting for you. If you want to learn more about the warning, or learn how to change the setting, you can get help from the panel to the right.

    Error: the setting that we checked will negatively affect your setup and should be fixed before you continue. Definitely review these results and make changes as needed. Help on how to fix issues is available from the panel to the right. If you see an error for something you haven't set up yet, such as DNS records, you can ignore the error for now. But, we recommend you run the readiness checks again after you get set up.

Impact to users

The checks don’t make any changes, so users won’t be affected.

Skills for successful completion

You don’t need any special skills to run readiness checks.

If you’re comfortable with what’s involved to get ready to set up Office 365, you’re ready to get started.

An icon that represents getting started

Get started

Go back to the setup assistant and click start to run the readiness checks.

> [!NOTE] > Using the Office 365 health, readiness, and connectivity checks is an optional step. Although we recommend it, especially if you’re migrating resources or integrating with a directory service, you don’t have to run these checks.