JENNIFER WOODBURY: Hello, and welcome to our session.
I'm Jenny Woodbury, the marketing manager for FastTrack
for Microsoft 365, and today with me
I have Eleanor Wort who, is the App Assure program manager.
Today, we are going to give you an overview of FastTrack
for Microsoft 365, our App Assure service,
and how you can use these benefits
to help accelerate your Microsoft 365 adoption journey.
So let's get started.
Simply stated, FastTrack is your advisor
to help you deploy Microsoft 365.
It's an ongoing benefit that comes with Microsoft 365 plans
and gives customer access to FastTrack specialists.
Ongoing means that throughout the life of your subscription,
at any point, the customer can come back
and ask for deployment assistance.
This deployment guidance is delivered by Microsoft
and approved partners at no additional cost.
We'll talk about that more in a bit,
but first, let's discuss the services
that FastTrack provides.
FastTrack helps customers configure identity, security,
compliance, and cloud management.
It also helps enable Teams, including workloads chat,
meetings, voice, and events,
and helps guide the deployment of Windows 10,
other Microsoft 365 Apps, and Microsoft Edge.
And last but not least, FastTrack performs email
and data migration and ensures application compatibility
with the App Assure service.
So next, let's cover what you get
with the FastTrack benefit.
All customers have access to our self-service guidance,
tools, and best practices that are available
on the FastTrack website.
For customers that have 150 or more licenses,
FastTrack has partners and remote engineers
who assist with onboarding, configuration, and deployment.
Now this service is remote assistance.
FastTrack provides the guidance,
and the customer is accountable
for executing the deployment.
For tenants that have 500 or more licenses,
FastTrack performs email and data migrations.
FastTrack's migration assistance can help you
to migrate your email and file content off of Google Suite,
Box, Dropbox, and of course, your on-premises platforms,
including exchange and file shares.
So next, let's spend some time
on what the FastTrack process involves.
The journey starts
by envisioning what a successful deployment will look like,
and FastTrack will help you
to assess where your organization is today,
and what actions you should plan for before, during,
and after your deployment.
Next, FastTrack will work with you to onboard
to your cloud solutions,
and help you remediate those issues.
As I mentioned earlier,
it will also help you migrate your email and data.
And throughout this process,
FastTrack will also provide you with guidance
and best practices to help you drive business value.
Now let's look a little bit more closely at each step
in the process,
and how FastTrack and our customers work together.
During the plan phase,
FastTrack will schedule an initial call and give guidance
on how you can build your deployment success plan.
For customers to get started,
they should visit Microsoft.com/FastTrack
and submit a request for assistance to engage FastTrack.
After that, customers are responsible
for identifying the solution that they want to deploy,
and creating that project plan.
In the assess phase, FastTrack will provide guidance
on enabling the service and provide you with timelines
and checklists to build that remediation plan.
Meanwhile, the customer's responsibility
is to gather environment data,
and to inventory and validate their applications.
They'll also set up a remediation plan.
During the remediation phase, FastTrack will help you
to guide the analysis and remediation for each service.
We'll hold checkpoint meetings with you along the way.
The customer's responsibility
is to remediate the source environment
and perform the config, hands-on configuration.
In the enable phase, FastTrack guides the scenario
of configuration and enablement,
and holds checkpoint meetings along the way
to evaluate the progress.
Meanwhile,
customers begin implementing their deployment plan.
During the migrate phase, FastTrack will provide guidance
to tenants with fewer than 500 licenses,
and will even perform data migrations
for customers that have more than 500 licenses.
And last but not least, as part of this whole process,
FastTrack provides self-serve tools, resources,
and best practices so customers can build
and execute their adoption plan.
Our guidance will help you to avoid common pitfalls
and execute the process the right time first.
Now FastTrack's process for enabling Microsoft 365
has helped organizations globally.
We've enabled more than 70,000 customers,
migrated 26 petabytes of data,
today, FastTrack provides guidance in 12 languages
and has web access in 27 languages,
and we have over 300 approved partners
who deliver customized onboarding experiences
with value-added services,
and are supported by FastTrack engineering resources.
And finally, with App Assure,
we've unblocked 70.6 million devices
from compatibility issues.
And speaking of App Assure,
I'm going to turn it over to Eleanor,
who's going to tell you more about this service.
ELEANOR WORT: Thanks, Jenny.
We launched App Assure two years ago with the promise
that we would help customers fix apps
that didn't work after upgrading to Windows 10
or Office Pro Plus.
We did this because Microsoft is committed
to making sure all of your business critical apps work.
Since then, we've evaluated nearly 700,000 applications
and discovered that less than a quarter of a percent of them
have had issues.
This is because Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 apps
were built with application compatibility in mind.
For that small percentage of apps that do have issues,
our dedicated team of app compat experts,
including App Assure managers and project engineers,
will guide you through the remediation process
from start to finish.
App Assure is included as part of your eligible subscription
at no additional cost.
We work directly with you to troubleshoot
and find the root cause of an application issue,
then determine how to fix it.
If it's an issue with a product like Windows or Office,
we work with Microsoft product teams to fix it.
In some cases, there are problems with third-party apps
where we work directly with the software vendor
to fix your issue.
Or it might be an issue
with your line-of-business application,
so we can help fix your code or provide other mitigations.
Our goal is to leave your business in a better state
after you work with our team.
This includes making your apps feature-proof and resilient
to subsequent product updates using remediations
that don't compromise the integrity
of your application security.
Since launching, we've added promises
to ensure app compatibility for Microsoft Edge
and Windows Virtual Desktop.
You may have heard Brad Anderson announce
that App Assure now supports Windows 10 on ARM devices.
For Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 apps,
compat shimming and settings changes are a common fix
for customer issues.
In this case, we work with you to create a shim
or a small library where we modify the parameters
that are getting passed to the API
to resolve compatibility issues.
For Edge, IE mode makes it easy
to use all the sites your organization needs
in a single browser.
Edge uses the integrated Chromium engine for modern sites
and the Trident MSHTML engine for IE11 for legacy sites.
A common compatibility concern for Edge is with display
and functionality issues that occur
when accessing a site designed with legacy dependencies.
These issues can be remediated by adding the site
to the Enterprise Mode Site List to utilize IE mode.
A helpful tip for migrating to Edge
is that using Enterprise Site Discovery
can help you identify these legacy sites,
and configure your Enterprise Mode Site List successfully.
Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session
enables multiple concurrent interactive sessions,
and is supported exclusively in Windows Virtual Desktop,
also known as WVD.
Customers have faced issues
with moving applications currently hosted
in an on-premise remote desktop session environment
to Windows 10 multi-session in WVD
because they are hard-coded to work only on server OS.
To resolve this issue, App Assure engineers work
to provide guidance
for either updating the application code,
or updating the installer
to get the application working on WVD.
For customers supplying Windows 10 on ARM devices
such as the Surface Pro X,
we now offer a new compatibility promise.
PCs have traditionally been powered by x86 processors,
but there is a growing ecosystem of PCs powered
by ARM-based processors.
The ARM architecture enables PCs
to have additional benefits such as all-day battery life,
and built-in LTE cellular connectivity.
Some customers have run into issues
where their home-grown business apps
or third-party software apps can't run on ARM processors.
Our engineers provide guidance
on how to recompile those apps to be ARM-native,
and help debug issues as they arise.
Now that you know a little bit about what we do,
I want to share a customers success story.
Recently, we helped a customer
who was beta testing the Surface Pro X
before rolling out 18,000 devices company-wide.
They discovered
that the Microsoft Local Administrator Password Solution,
or LAPS, could not be installed.
Since LAPS is used to manage passwords,
this blocked their testing efforts.
Partnering with the Surface engineering team,
our engineers discovered that the installation issue
was related to a GPO plug-in that was incompatible
with ARM processors, so we recompiled the application
to be ARM-native, and the customer's testing
was successfully unblocked.
Another customer success story
is with a large American health insurance company.
They used a shorted URL pattern
as an easy way to give employees access
to company's internal sites.
After deploying to Microsoft Edge,
the internal shortened URL links redirected incorrectly
to an internet search of a word in the URL
instead of to an internal site.
This impacted their workflow and required unnecessary steps
to access crucial internal sites.
After investigation, our support engineer discovered
that a forward slash in the shortened URL pattern
was not considered proper punctuation.
This caused it to appear as multiple words,
which led to an internet search query.
Our engineer engaged the Edge team to investigate further,
and they quickly identified that adding the forward slash
to the Edge punctuation policy list
resolved the customer concern.
The product team released this bug fix
in the next beta version of Edge
just a month after the bug was reported.
The customer confirmed the issue was resolved,
and more than 120,000 users were unblocked.
Another happy customer.
To work with App Assure, submit your request for assistance
through the App Assure portal,
and our router will assign your case
to a dedicated App Assure manager
to help resolve your issue.
For more information, visit aka.ms/AppAssure.
Have questions?
Send us an email at achelp@microsoft.com.
To learn more
about all the FastTrack services available to you,
please visit www.microsoft/FastTrack.com.
Thank you for taking the time to watch our video.
Our team looks forward to engaging with you
on your deployment project,
and/or helping you solve your app compat issues
should any arise.