Many of our customers have signed up for Microsoft's free FastTrack service that they are eligible for if they purchased certain enterprise versions of Microsoft 365, Windows 10, or Office 365. But they are also confused about what it is for, what to expect, and how to get the most out of it — and concrete information about the exact details are sometimes hard to find.
To save you the time and effort, we scoured dozens of the latest Microsoft Ignite sessions, documentation pages, and supplemental material to give you the most comprehensive overview of what the Microsoft FastTrack service is, what its goals and objectives are, what you can expect in terms of the process, and what the responsibilities are. Lastly, we looked at the overlap and where it integrates with Juriba's Dashworks solution and visualized it all in a handy infographic:
Essentially, Microsoft FastTrack is a free service open to all Microsoft customers that aims to help organizations and their partners accelerate deployment and gain end-user adoption of Office 365, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Windows 10. If your organization purchased fewer than 150 seats, you still get access to self-serve training materials, online tools, and other resources..
If you have more than 150 seats of eligible SKUs, you get access to dedicated Microsoft employees (FastTrack engineers), Microsoft-approved vendors, and Microsoft-approved partners that will help you plan your scenarios to move to the cloud and adopt the Modern Desktop. While we weren't able to find exact Service-Level Agreements regarding response times and such, Microsoft has published an extensive list of customer responsibilities and FastTrack tasks.
Generally, Microsoft will act as a consulting partner that provides remote support assistance as well as documentation, software tools and admin consoles to reduce or eliminate certain configuration tasks to achieve the required configuration activities that need to be met to adopt Microsoft 365, Windows 10, and Office 365.
FastTrack customers, on the other hand, need to manage the program and project management, any kind of reporting, documentation, training, change management, and end user communication as well as the procurement, installation, and configuration of any software, hardware, networks and infrastructure, application testing and packaging, planning and inventory tasks, and much more.
In short, FastTrack acts in a supporting advisory role that can help you with industry best practices of how to best adopt Microsoft technology while you do the project asset readiness and heavy lifting. In certain situations like mailbox moves, FastTrack will also provide migration services, receiving an Excel sheet of mailboxes to move and which date and migration wave they are part of. They will then execute the change on your behalf and provide an output as to whether the mailbox move was successful or not. Batching the mailboxes or getting the assets ready for migration is your responsibility.
And this is where Juriba Dashworks comes in!
By combining Microsoft FastTrack and Juriba Dashworks, you create a winning team that will take those best practices and turn them into scalable, repeatable processes you can execute on. For example, use Dashworks to supply your FastTrack team with an up-to-date, exact inventory of your estate. Or take their implementation advice and translate it into a project framework, self-service portal, or end-user communication workflow within minutes that can be output to the Microsoft service in the correct format whilst also being ready to accept an input on success for reporting and remediation purposes.
