Microsoft is increasing its effort to bring important Office business clients to the cloud. Office 365 FastTrack, a service to helps clients migrating their infrastructure to the Office 365 cloud is now available permanently and not just once like before.
FastTrack is a service offered to medium and large businesses with more than 150 users which helps IT departments to move their company office tools from their own servers to Microsoft's cloud.
Moving functions that so far get handled on-premises like Active Directory and email to the cloud is a difficult task for IT departments.
The decision to offer ongoing FastTrack support is aimed to motivate large and medium businesses to move their infrastructure to the cloud.
Microsoft explains the decision in further detail on the Office Blog.
“Over the last year, we've helped thousands of customers with varying degrees of IT complexity onboard to Office 365 while reducing their implementation costs, accelerating their time to value and delivering a great customer experience.
With our commitment to delivering the best customer experience, and based on feedback from our customers, we're excited to announce the evolution of FastTrack from an onboarding service to our customer success service designed to help you realize business value faster with the Microsoft Cloud.
First, we're changing FastTrack from a one-time benefit to an ongoing benefit. This enables you to request support in onboarding new users and capabilities at any time, and as many times as needed, for the life of your subscription.”
FastTrack upgraded with customized support
The improved Microsoft FastTrack as an ongoing service consists of best practices, tools, resources and personalized remote assistance available through the new website FastTrack.microsoft.com.
As an increased amount of service requests will require more personnel and resources, Microsoft has established a new unit called the FastTrack Center. According to Microsoft clients can count on “a team of hundreds of engineers who have been focused to date on providing IT professionals and partners all over the world with remote onboarding and migration assistance.”
Office 365 FastTrack will offer three levels of support which Microsoft calls Envisioning, Onboarding and Driving Business Value.
While Envisioning and Onboarding are clearly aimed to the migration planning and implementation, Driving Business Value will provide “best practices, guidance and resources on Office 365 user adoption to help you get started, and will connect you as needed with qualified partners who can help you do more.”
Source: Microsoft
