Office 365 is a platform that was created to bring Office to the cloud and make it available not only for large enterprises, but also for small organizations.

All organizations, regardless of size, need careful preparation, even for small migrations. Organizations that have on-premises solutions need to be integrated with Office 365, and may require additional preparation, depending on each workload (as is the case with Exchange, for instance). The requirements and objectives for each type of migration can vary depending on the complexity of the environment, the on-premises version, and other factors.

The planning phase is critical to using the base technologies to leverage and implement Office 365. Office 365 includes several cloud-optimized productivity services, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Yammer, Skype for Business, and Microsoft Teams hosted...

In every project or deployment of Office 365, it is advised that you evaluate Office 365 regardless of whether it is for a small, medium, or large organization.

Office 365 is a suite of products that is ready to use. It comes with a basic configuration of the products, but it's necessary to deploy the featured technologies themselves, such as Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, and Office. Some preparation may be required depending on the size of your organization. If it's an enterprise organization, you will probably want to integrate it with on-premises technologies, such as your Active Directory (AD).

To try out Office 365, follow the instructions to create the Office 365 trial in the following section.

The deployment phase is a very important part in implementing Office 365. It is where you set up and start using your products based on the requirements of your organization.

When you start planning your deployment of Office 365, it is advised that you follow the best practices described in the following steps:

1. Start of the project: This stage is initiated when the planning phase described earlier in this chapter ends and it is accepted. At this time, the project manager starts coordinating the activities of the team and starts providing feedback to the sponsor of the project.
2. Assessment: At this stage, the planning team starts to create an inventory of all areas needed in the on-premises environment that could necessitate updates to the infrastructure. This step is essential in order to avoid problems with the deployment, and requires configuring the relevant features...

The Office 365 descriptions are what I call the Bible of Office 365. This information can help any organization to learn about Office 365 and its services. You find information about many of the services at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office-365-service-descriptions.aspx.

To learn more about each service, see its description:

• Office 365 Platform Service Description
• Office Applications Service Description
• Office Online Service Description
• Exchange Online Service Description
• Exchange Online Protection Service Description
• Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection Service Description
• Exchange Online Archiving Service Description
• OneDrive for Business Service Description
• SharePoint Online Service Description
• Skype for Business Online Service Description
• Workplace Analytics Service Description
• Power BI Service Description
• Project Online Service...

To analyze any environment on-premises that might be needed for Office 365 to work, you can use tools such as the following:

• Deployment guide
• Office 365 readiness checks
• Service descriptions
• Remote connectivity analyzer
• Bandwidth and reliability network analyzer

There are references provided by Microsoft that describe the best practices in starting a project. The following is a summary of each tool and guide to help you with each project:

• Deployment guide: For more information on deploying Office 365 Enterprise in your organization refer to https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Deploy-Office-365-Enterprise-for-your-organization-ee73dafb-be54-492e-bcfd-0fbfb5f65e94
• Set up Office 365: To set up Office 365, follow these steps:

• 1. Start an Office 365 trial
  2. Assign your domains to Office 365
  3. Install AD Connect to synchronize objects
  4. Configure services and...

In this chapter, you have learned about the fundamentals of Office 365. Planning is key whenever you need to execute a project, regardless of its size. Evaluation is a continuous process that is advisable for any project and implementation. We went through a summary of a standard deployment process to learn more about successfully deploying Office 365. You have also learned about the various service descriptions within Office 365, and learned which Office 365 service maps to which Office 365 plan and how to map them with each other. You also learned about their service limits and how to analyze their vulnerabilities in order to always keep them updated.

You now have more information that will help you to understand the fundamentals of Office 365.

In the next chapter, you will learn the basic workloads of Office 365. It will cover the three most used workloads of Office...