I’m Korneel Bullens, a Sr. Customer Engineering Architect, within the Skype for Business Customer Experience and Deployment Team.
Our mission is to ensure a smooth and enjoyable experience for all Skype for Business deployments. We created an overall model to Plan, Deliver, and Operate, called the Skype Operations Framework (SOF). The SOF model targets everyone participating in Skype for Business deployments. All Partners, Deployment Teams. and Customers are in this scope’s framework. I am proud to participate in that goal!
In this post, I’d like to talk about my personal favorite: The Network Readiness Assessment. When we first released this, as part of SOF V1, our vision was to make this an easy-to-execute, mandatory part of every deployment. Since the release of SOF V2, in September 2016, we made sure to provide an essential piece of every Skype for Business deployment approach.
The Network Readiness Assessment is a mandatory Activity within SOF. It helps guide both the deployment team and (say: what’s the difference between the two) the customer, through network readiness verification for Skype for Business. This is done through:
- Calculating required Bandwidth
- Testing the network with Network Testing Tools
- Providing Recommended Practices for networking with Skype for Business
Using these steps as an educational approach, ensures that we have both prepared and taught our customers how to maintain a great network foundation for Skype for Business. Now our customers have the resources and assets required to scope and analyze future SOF network scenarios.
At the same time, we are working with great partners to make sure they can provide additional services based on the Network Readiness Assessment. These partners provide “Advanced” offerings or “Add-On” tools to augment and continue forward with the framework.
I’d like to invite you to download the Network Readiness Assessment. Please provide feedback and ask any questions you have in our community discussions!
