Communications is key in any project and for those of you that are working on a Hybrid Cloud imitative this blog post will be very interesting.

I often get requests from my clients regarding communications plans, email templates, process, and general end user adoption plans.

The above items are some of the single biggest non-technical factors to running a successful or not so successful project.

Introducing the Microsoft Fastrack website: http://fastrack.microsoft.com

This site is chalk full of great resources to help you be success with your upcoming projects.

Let’s take use our time in this blog post and explore what this portal gives us shall we.

First you will launch http://fasttrack.microsoft.com

Note: This site is only for business users or educational users it is not for personal accounts.

Once accepted into the program à we can explore things a bit with the welcome pop-up.

First thing let’s try to start a new plan.

We can give a bit of detail to our new project. What’s cool is that there are project fast tracks for:

Office 365

Enterprise Mobility + Security

Dynamics 365

Windows Azure

And Windows 10

For this post, we will select Office 365 and put a start and finish date for our project along with a brief description.

Click on Skip and Get Started


One for the coolest things about this Fasttrack program from Microsoft is the fact that as an end customer you can request a Sandbox Office 365 tenant for you testing.

Mine is currently depleted but this can be added upon request. And you Microsoft Account Manager can always help you with this process.


The Fasttrack program is also a gateway into all the help and offers that Microsoft currently has for your Cloud Project.


That’s right you saw it here you can actually request some funding assistance from Microsoft in here for your own migration.

I went through the process in the Fasttrack and created my very own success plan. This is really great because it is customized and tailored to your needs and requirements.


If you look inside of your own success plan you will find a Success Plan Library with Documents and Training Resources.


The Training resources are absolutely amazing as the videos in here are geared towards end user adoption of the technologies.

Remember I stated earlier that the hardest part of any IT Project is the Soft Sell with the end users with a Technology Change.

Microsoft has really created a winner with this Fasttrack program removing almost 100 % of the pain to create this material.

It’s no wonder why Microsoft just eclipsed 100 million active subscribers on Office 365 and heading towards 24 billion annual revenue in their cloud business.

As part of this training Microsoft has organized all of their Office 365 Training videos in a single Bill of Materials – BOM


When I last checked this had over 190 end user how-to MS Office 2016 videos.


This can be downloaded from: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54088

There are also additional download options for offline resources. This is all geared to help you setup your internal awareness portal.


A great example of what you can build for your own company and users is this IT Portal from Stanford University IT.

https://uit.stanford.edu/service/office365


Lastly, I was on a phone call with my Microsoft Account Manager and he said Microsoft is also willing to help us out with our project and the Fasttrack by printing user awareness posters and flyers.

Once again Microsoft thank you this Fasttrack program is amazing. Keep up the good work.

Happy Learning,

Dave