Office 365 Infrastructure Planning

Office 365 Infrastructure Planning

It is essential to know the deployment planning concepts before deciding to move your services to the cloud. In this post, I will try to explain you O365 Infrastructure Planning for the cloud deployments and migration considerations in your organization.

Connecting to the Office 365 Service

In order to have the best experience for using Office 365, it is highly recommend that you always use the latest version of the respective browsers, Office clients, and apps.

• Microsoft currently supports the current or the immediate previous version of Internet Explorer or Firefox, or the latest version of Chrome or Safari.
• Any version of Microsoft Office in mainstream support.

Currently there are some known issues with following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 9
• Internet Explorer 8

• Office 365 is designed to work with Tier 1 browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, or the latest version of Internet Explorer and Edge.
• Most Office 365 plans provide you with the latest versions of Office desktop applications, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
• Keep your Office up to date

Operating system requirements

• The only operating system requirement for O365 is that is supported by its manufacturer
• Extended support for Windows XP ended on April 8, 2014
• Office 365 will not deliberately prevent  or cut-off connections from Windows XP client systems.
• The O365 experience may diminish over time for older clients and operating systems.

Recommendation: Please Upgrade to a Microsoft supported operating system.

Network Requirements:

• Office 365 will provide the correct DNS values during the addition of the vanity domain wizard
• An overview of all DNS entries for all services can also be found on the TechNet site.
• Office 365 uses Geo-DNS.
• Users will be routed to the nearest Microsoft datacenter. Based on the client’s external IP-address.
• In the majority of cases this will have a positive effect on latency

Firewall Requirements

• For a summary of services and their ports and protocols see: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh852522.aspx
• An overview of all Office 365 services and it’s corresponding DNS names and IP-addresses can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh373144.aspx

Office 365 is continuously evolving. Please keep yourselves up-to date with the latest information available on the Microsoft website.