Planning your Office 365 installation? Then you’ll need to read this

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Deploying software across a business is, of course, a complex task, but Microsoft wants to make things easier for IT staff, at least when it comes to Office 365, with the release of a guide to preferred deployment practices for the online productivity suite.

Specifically, we are talking about Office 365 ProPlus and how best to both prepare the ground for the rollout of the suite in your company, and tackle the actual process of deployment – and then keep on top of ongoing maintenance and management afterwards.

Microsoft notes the guide is aimed at IT pros and it offers “actionable guidance and real-world examples on how you can deploy Office 365 ProPlus successfully in various scenarios”.

Four steps to success

Broadly, the four steps to a successful deployment begins with assessment – checking important issues such as app compatibility – followed by planning, which is creating an actual deployment plan.

Then stage three is deployment itself – the guide discusses the three options available, which are enterprise managed, locally managed and cloud managed deployments. And the final stage is management, which looks at ongoing maintenance, patching, updates and so forth.

There’s also a section which contains reference materials, namely videos further exploring ProPlus deployments including a ‘deep dive’ into the issues involved, and there are various sample customer scenarios presented – the aforementioned example real-world deployments which may come in handy to help you get your head around things better.

As MS Poweruser spotted, you’ll find the full guide here under the ‘deployment guidance’ section.

• Also note that we recently fully updated our Office 2016 review