Over the last few weeks, I’ve attended a couple of Microsoft Office 365 workshops during which I picked up quite a bit of useful information, not least Malcolm Bullock’s (@MBullock) list of Office 365 deployment planning resources.

Office 365 is straightforward: it’s a service; it does what’s in the service descriptions. But successful migration to the service depends on thorough planning.

Of course, this is the point where I should say, “talk to Fujitsu; I’ve got a team of guys who can help you through this” – and I have* but that’s not why people read this blog! What I’ll do instead, is outline some of the resources that Malcolm shared and which should be considered an essential “Office 365 deployment toolkit”:

• Office 365 Service Descriptions. These are gospel. If the service description says you can do something with the service, you can; and if it says you can’t do it, you can’t. If the information is not there, you probably can’t. It’s binary; black and white – no grey. Office 365 is not for everyone – that’s why on premise and hybrid options exist.
• Software Requirements for Office 365. Generally, Microsoft gives 12 months’ notice of changes to system requirements but they’re also introducing an n-1 stance on browser support. Bear in mind that, just because something isn’t supported doesn’t mean that it won’t work but using unsupported software is far from ideal and it’s entirely possible that legacy software may be denied access in order to avoid security issues.
• Office 365 Enterprise Deployment Guide (MODG). Put simply, this describes how to deploy Office 365 in the enterprise.
• Exchange Deployment Guide (ExDeploy). This is a software tool to run through for on-premise, hybrid or cloud deployments of Exchange.
• Solution Alignment Workshop. These workshops are professional services, offered by Microsoft and their partners to make sure that the customer requirements are aligned with the Office 365 service. These workshops (together with a number of tools, such as the Deployment Readiness Tool and the Office Alignment Index Calculator) are now being replaced by OnRamp, a streamlined on-boarding process allowing customers to take a staged approach to their Office 365 migration.
• Test/demo environment. Register for a trial Office 365 tenant.
• Office 365 Pro Plus Deployment Tool. A tool to configure the click-to-run functionality for local streaming of Office 365 ProPlus desktop software.

There are also many tools and diagnostic utilities referenced from the Office 365 Community website.

* In all seriousness, I’d be happy to discuss Office 365 opportunities with any UK-based enterprises looking at migrating their email to the cloud, or even looking for a hybrid or fully-managed Exchange/Lync/SharePoint solution but this is my personal blog and in no way endorsed by my employer. If you would like a professional conversation, please do get in touch.

Unlike me, who is not VAT-registered and only does his company accounts once a year when he needs to submit a tax return (usually on or around the last possible day…), my wife needs to be a bit more organised and, since she shares the same Office 365 hosting arrangements, I needed to dig out some VAT invoices for her today.  I can never remember how to do this, so maybe blogging it will help me in a few months’ time (and may help someone else too)…

1. Sign into the customer portal.
2. On the admin page, on the left pane, under Subscription, click Manage.
3. Click on the plan name – for me, that’s Microsoft Office 365 (Plan P1).
4. On the subscription details page click View bill.

If you want to download/print a bill, printable invoices and a graphical billing history are available (links in the top-right corner of the Online Bill portal)

Incidentally, I hadn’t previously noticed that the rate of VAT on my account is 23% – that’s because it’s billed in Ireland, allegedly to avoid* UK corporation tax…

*Tax avoidance is legal, even if morally dubious (particularly on the scale at which large corporations work). Evasion would not be

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experience of resetting my Office 365 password/disabling password expiry after I became locked out. At the time I had some issues proving my identity because there was no ‘phone number on file for my account. I had added my mobile number to the user profile associated with my mailbox but that didn’t seem to be what the support team needed.

I’ve since learned that the crucial field is on the technical contact details for the organisation. A Microsoft Support Engineer wrote in an email to me:

“[…] the company information can be changed from the Online Portal. When you sign in and navigate to the admin panel, you should see your organization’s name in the upper left corner. When you click that, it brings up your organization’s information. The global administrator can edit these fields by mousing over them and clicking the small ‘Edit’ button that appears.”

Interestingly, since my support incident, Microsoft has introduced self-service password resets for Office 365 but these seem to be reliant on two other pieces of information that are specific to an individual user account:

• An alternate email address (one that’s not on the Office 365 system – I used a Hotmail account that is also a connected account so I still see service updates in my usual mailbox).
• The mobile phone field in the user properties (i.e. the one that I had set on my account but which was not the one Microsoft Support were looking for!)