We are excited to announce what's new in Skype Operations Framework (SOF), since our April 2017 release, to showcase customer success and how we've improved your SOF experience.
- Published additional stories of customer success with Skype for Business Online.
- Launched a new workbook to help customers / partners plan for success as a first step in their journey.
- Delivered a new Skype Academy experience.
- Simplified key Deliver and Operate assets, based on customer/partner feedback.
- Extended the coverage of SOF to cover 3rd-party hardware/software/services.
New Customer Success Stories
SOF has helped customers not only deploy Skype for Business, but realize the many benefits by leveraging the SOF framework, including cost savings, infrastructure streamlining, and delighting employees. To showcase this success, we added new customer success stories of customers who have successfully deployed Skype for Business E5 workloads by leveraging the SOF framework.
Planning for Customer Success Workbook
Before delving into SOF, we've learned the importance for customers and partners to identify and understand critical considerations in the early Planning stages and created the Planning for Customer Success Workshop. To accompany this workshop, we've created the Planning for Customer Success Workbook to showcase business value and the benefits of Skype for Business within an organization, rather than focusing on technical implementation.
New Skype Academy Experience
When we started providing technical and SOF readiness training through Skype Academy, we only had a few Readiness sessions available. However, over the last year, our training materials grew substantially, so we decided to add a few new features to Skype Academy. Our goal is to give customers and partners a better learning experience, including personalized training plans, the ability to add/remove training assets to your plan, and the ability to track the progress of your learning path.
To find out more, please visit the full launch blog here.
SOF Simplification
We strive to make it easier for customers and partners to leverage SOF. As part of this release, we consolidated several assets in the Deliver and Operate phases based on your feedback, and we continue to work on further simplification going forward.
As part of this initiative, we have updated the Get Deployed and Cloud Migration interactive guides and their associated downloads and navigation.
We have updated the training here on Skype Academy with the new assets.
Direct Links to Assets
Deliver Phase
Testing Guidance Delivery Guide
User Enablement Delivery Guide
Site Rollout/Migration Planning Delivery Guide
Operate Phase
CQD for Skype for Business Online-Delivery and Operations Guide
Hybrid Management and Operations Guide
Hybrid Environment Monitoring Guide
SOF Aligned Partner Assets
We are very proud to launch an exciting, new extension to SOF. We are publishing SOF-aligned guidance, created by our key partners, to help you integrate their hardware / software / service as part of an SOF project.
This SOF practical guidance, provided by our key partners, builds on top of the SOF assets and gives you the project information you need, through the lens of Plan, Deliver, and Operate. We continue to iterate on SOF, and you should expect future updates to SOF-Aligned Partner Assets.
AudioCodes is the first partner to provide this level of guidance with additional partner guidance to follow soon. Please visit the SOF Aligned Partner Assets page to download their first version of this asset.
Feedback
Please join the conversation in the SOF Community and share your thoughts and experiences, about our new updates and more, via our feedback site.