Congratulations, your business decides to implement cloud, but how do you begin to support the Office 365 service? | Blogging Thoughts on SharePoint and Office 365

The day personnel within a larger organization receive management approval to leverage cloud, SaaS offers (including Microsoft’s Office 365) may be a cause for celebration. But if your team is responsible for support, planning for the Office 365 service to be up and running 7×24 can be a headache. So it makes sense to use the same occasion to kick off a support plan for Office 365.

Microsoft offers a two part video tutorial on planning how to troubleshoot Office 365 via Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) and Channel 9. The first of the webcasts is titled Office 365 Troubleshooting: (01) Troubleshooting the Office 365 Service. The intended audience for the webcasts are administrators. The prerequisites are “MVA – Administering Office 365 for Small Business” and a publication from Microsoft Press titled “Microsoft Office 365 Administration Inside Out”. The webcast is led by Curtis Sawin, a Technology Solutions Professional based in Microsoft’s New York Metro District, and Chris Oakman, VP, Chief Infrastructure Officer of Eastridge, a Microsoft Partner (and member of the Office 365 Partner Advisory Council) based in Winston Salem, North Carolina.

The course is geared towards a busy professional. A downloadable PowerPoint presentation is included, as reference material. As well, a number of demonstrations are included. Attending the full course (including both sessions) earns 50 MVA points.

The first three topics covered by this webcast are:

Service Availability
Licensing Issues
DNS

Service Availability

Curtis Sawin summarizes the key points of concern Office 365 administrators should attend to:

Is the service performing? (in other words, is it available?)
Can users get to their “stuff” from anywhere? (meaning email, stored documents, etc)

Sawin takes the audience to the Office 365 dashboard. He explains the service health presentation. He also mentions the Office 365 Admin app (which we were happy to see is available via Google Play Store and loaded very easily on our LG Android KitKat smartphone).

He also mentions “Systems Center Operations Manager Management pack for Office 365”. Finally, he mentions the “recently released” “Office 365 Service Communications API”, which can be used to build custom service management tools.

We will continue commenting on this video presentation in the next post to this blog.