Office 365 Deployment Readiness Tool Beta Released

Office365 Migration Readiness Tool
Office365 Migration Readiness Tool

On Friday (May 6th), Microsoft released the Enterprise Beta Readiness Tool for Office365. As the name implies, this tool is meant to do a quick readiness check on your environment.  Upon execution, it will automatically extract the files to C:office365reskit and launch the app within IE. If you system has IE locked down, this may be problematic or at least require the acknowledgement of a few warnings. As it’s running, it collects information (be patient) from your organization’s network into its temp directory (c:office365reskittmp). The files within this directory are plain text and offer an interesting look into the environment. Unfortunately, once the test completes, the utility analyzes and consolidates these temp files and deletes the originating files, leaving a technical person with much to be desired.

 

The report is long and not filled with a whole lot of technical details. It gives basic information about your organization like sip domains, AD functionality levels, Exchange org, object counts and more. It then compares that to known requirements to measure your readiness to migrate to Office365 and gives a pass/fail grade in each category. For an organization looking at Office365, this info will give a good base to start a discovery process towards Office365 readiness.

My overall impression is the tool is a bit rough around the edges but a useful for quick discovery. The information can even be helpful for doing quick, limited Active Directory, Exchange and OCS/Lync discovery (although there are better tools for this job). Microsoft is showings its commitment to what will likely become a pretty aggressive push to business migration to their cloud offerings.