The Office 365 Best Practices Analyzer for Exchange Server 2013 is an automated tool that evaluates the health and readiness of your on-premises Exchange Server 2013 environment. You can run BPA at anytime to assess the state of your Exchange configuration.
To use the Office 365 Best Practices Analyzer for Exchange Server 2013
- Sign In With Sign up for an Office 365 or Azure Active Directory Account
- Log on to a domain-joined computer in your organization by using administrator credentials.
- Go to https://onramp.office365.com/onramp/, and click anywhere to start.
- Do one of the following:
- If you’ve already signed up for Office 365, click sign in.
- No user ID? No problem. Click sign up now, and get a user ID in just a few minutes. You can sign up for an Office 365 trial for free now, and convert to a paid subscription later.
- On the service selection screen, select Office 365, and then click next.
- Answer a series of questions to specify your requirements. OnRamp runs checks and creates reports as described in the following sections. As you make progress, we provide an indicator of setup complexity.
Click learn more links for detailed information about the current question or requirement. Your progress is automatically saved, so you can always come back later and resume your OnRamp session.
Requirements
As you progress through the first few screens, you provide your deployment requirements to OnRamp. Any subsequent questions that you see and the environmental checks that run are all based on these requirements.
Feature selection
Select the features of Office 365 that you’re ready to deploy. You can select all of the services now or you can start with email, for example, and come back to OnRamp later when you’re ready to introduce additional services.
Watch this video to learn more about Office 365 features.
User management
Select one or more of the methods that you’ll use to manage users. Managing users with directory synchronization or adding federation services for single sign-on increases deployment complexity.
Watch this video to learn more about your user management options.
Email migration
Select an email migration option if you want to move email data to the cloud for your users. The option you select depends on your current messaging system. You can select no migration, and then use connected accounts or import the .pst files to let users see existing mail in their new Inbox.
Watch this video to learn more email migration options.
Readiness
In this section, OnRamp asks questions to assess readiness of your on-premises environment for connecting to Office 365. You can add comments to any question, and take notes about follow-up items. You may not see any questions and move directly to automatic checks. This is expected behavior.
The linked Readiness steps are available when you start this section. The Readiness steps provide an overview of the deployment tasks you have to perform and links to additional resources.
Automatic checks
Run automatic checks to test your environment to make sure it’s ready for Office 365. No changes are made and no data is stored while these checks are being run. Be sure that you’re running the checks from a domain-joined computer in your on-premises environment. To run all the tests, you must have the necessary credentials and your workstation has to meet all the requirements. They are checked before the tests run. If your computer does not meet all the requirements, you can follow the provided links to install needed components.
We recommend that you also run automatic checks again after completing the items in the Readiness steps. These checks detect any errors, such as missing DNS records or Active Directory users that need to be fixed before you set up directory synchronization. It’s important to note that OnRamp checks are run against your on-premises environment, so DNS checks will verify internal resolution. Also, OnRamp will look at all of your Active Directory domains. You may see auto check failures for domains that you won’t be using in Office 365. Those failures can be safely ignored.
To run environmental checks
- The website will prompt you to install the Microsoft Office 365 OnRamp add-on. Click install, then click Yes at the User Account Control prompt.
- On the automatic checks page, click start testing.
- Review the list of environmental checks that will run, and then click start checks.
- When prompted, provide your tenant admin credentials.
Be patient while the checks run. This can take a while, depending on the size and complexity of your organization.
After the checks are complete, a summary of their status is displayed. Review the details for all failed checks, so that you can make corrections as needed. Click view details next to any check for more information.
In the details view, use the environmental check categories to move between feature areas. Subcategories for each feature area are also available. Use the drop-down list to filter results.
Display a list of failures in the results pane, and then select the check box next to any item to review more information about the check and the reason it failed.
Failures can highlight tasks that have to be performed to complete your deployment or migration. After taking corrective action, you can rerun the automatic checks at any time to verify your current state of readiness. Click the back arrow to return to the OnRamp experience. You can click check again to rerun checks, or click just keep going to move on the feature review survey.
Feature Review
Completing the questions in the feature review section is optional, but recommended to learn more about Office 365. This section can help you to align your deployment goals with the capabilities of Office 365. These questions may identify feature areas where additional research or planning is required before you deploy. The linked OnRamp report for Office 365 summarizes your responses. You can easily refer to any item that needs follow-up.
Summary
- Use OnRamp to specify your deployment requirements and receive guidance for how to proceed with your deployment.
- You can take advantage of the environmental checks in OnRamp to assess your deployment readiness and health.
- You can return to OnRamp at any time to introduce additional features and complexity or use a phased approach for your deployment.
- Please send us feedback about your OnRamp experience so that we can continue to make improvements!
