Introduction –

As a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft, I run into numerous instances where our customers have raised the need for them to have greater control and flexibility in using the Microsoft Premier Services.

More and more customers are demanding greater control and flexibility in

• Picking the deliverables
• Deciding the duration
• Spreading the delivery over multiple weeks/months instead of doing everything within a week
• Reducing disruption of normal IT operations
• Reducing delivery wait times, and
• Maximizing ROI for the Microsoft Premier Service offerings.

We hear you and we are changing –

What if we told you that, as a customer, you now have greater ability and flexibility to pick and choose the deliverables you want, from a list of deliverables within a service?

We hear you that it is not always easy to tell your team to focus solely on a Microsoft engagement for a week at stretch. What if we told you that, as a customer, you now have greater ability and flexibility to define the duration of the engagement? Not only that, what if we gave you the ability to break a single 5-day engagement into 5 separate single day deliverables spread across multiple weeks/months?

What if we told you that, as a customer, you now have greater ability to demand and request best in class resources by breaking a single engagement with multiple deliverables into multiple separate single day engagements, therefore potentially getting different SMEs for each of those deliverables?

What if we told you that, as a customer, you now have greater ability and flexibility to reduce the cost of Microsoft engagements by having greater control on deliverables, schedule and duration of the engagements?

Onboarding Accelerator – Implementing Modern Device Management –

Ladies and gentlemen! Allow me to introduce to you a new Premier service in the Microsoft Services portfolio that not only helps our customers adopt and implement the new Modern Device Management capabilities but also give our customers the control and flexibility we spoke of above. The service is ‘Onboarding Accelerator – Implementing Modern Device Management’

This is a new offering in our services catalog aimed at successful adoption of Modern Device Management technologies within your organization. It covers the current hot Modern Device Management trends like

• Autopilot
• Co-Management with Intune and SCCM
• IBCM with Cloud Management Gateway and Cloud Distribution Points
• Conditional Access with Intune
• SCCM Integrated Autopilot Task Sequences.

Customer Centric Modular Content –

To make it easy for our customers to pick and choose the modern device management technology(s) that they need, we have broken down the Onboarding Accelerator – Implementing Modern Device Management service into 9 independent 1-day modules. The idea here is to let our customers pick the modules they want from this list, instead of Microsoft mandating a fixed set of deliverables.

*- Module 4 can be used to deploy standalone Cloud Distribution Points using Classic model. This feature has been deprecated and will reach end of support after November 2019. We recommend using the Cloud Management Gateway settings to deploy a Cloud Distribution Point going forward.

Customer Focused Delivery Types –

To enable our customers to pick the modules they need from this service and then schedule it based on their operational constraints, we have created multiple delivery vehicles for this onboarding accelerator.

Some Real-world Customer Scenarios for Modern Device Management

Allow me to illustrate how these delivery types and 1-day modules allow our customers greater control and flexibility in scheduling and implementing Modern Device Management capabilities through the ‘Onboarding accelerator – Implementing Modern Device Management’ service.

Scenario 1 –

A customer looks at all the modules within this service and decides that it wants to implement just the Cloud Management Gateway and nothing else.

In this case, the customer can order the ‘Base’ delivery type and pick modules M1 and M3. M1 for Assessment and Planning and M3 for implementing Cloud Management Gateway.

This will be a remote delivery.

Scenario 2 –

A customer looks at all the modules within this service and decides that it wants to implement the Cloud Management Gateway and Comanagement.

In this case, the customer can order the ‘Base’ + ‘Add On’ deliveries and pick modules M1+ M3 for base and M5 for Add on. M1 for Assessment and Planning and M3 for implementing Cloud Management Gateway and M5 for implementing Comanagement.

This will be a remote delivery. The delivery dates for Base and Add On are independent of each other. The customer can choose them to be consecutive or choose them to be delivered on a different week or month.

Scenario 3 –

A customer looks at all the modules within this service and decides that it wants to implement the Cloud Management Gateway, Comanagement, Conditional Access and Autopilot.

In this case, the customer can order the ‘Premium’ delivery and pick modules M1+ M3 + M5 + M7 + M8. M1 for Assessment and Planning, M3 for implementing Cloud Management Gateway, M5 for implementing Comanagement, M7 for Autopilot and M8 for Conditional Access.

This can be a remote or onsite delivery.

Some other common scenarios are illustrated in the table below –

Module 1 (M1 – Assessment and Planning) does not result in a day of engagement with the customer.

Follow up and feedback –

Please reach out to your Technical Account Managers (TAMs) to see how this Onboarding Accelerator can fit your Modern Device Management Implementation plans.

Special thanks and credit goes to the Onboarding Accelerator - MDM Dev and Leadership team, especially Evgeniya Cherdakova (ASD Program Manager), Jamin Almond (Lead), Richard Kwon (Lead), Abrar Muhib (Lead), Matt Toto, Chin Seng Goh, Keith Flagg, Darren Dean, Adam Nichols and Arnab Mitra

*** IMPORTANT: Before purchasing this engagement, check with your Account Team if you're eligible for FastTrack Center Benefit for Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS). You can use the EMS FastTrack Center Benefit when you purchase at least 150 licenses for EMS or any of its individual cloud services in an eligible plan. You then work with FastTrack Specialists to assess, remediate, enable, and drive usage of those services.***