Change Management Service Description_Office 365 Dedicated Plans_October 2011

7/28/2019 Change Management Service Description_Office 365 Dedicated Plans_October 2011

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Change Management for Enterprises

Dedicated Plans Service Description

Published: October 2011


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2Change Management for Enterprises Service Description (Dedicated Plans) | October 2011

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of

publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of

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2011 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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Contents

Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................ 4Change Management Process .......................................................................................................................... 5

Request for Change Process ....................................................................................................................................................... 5Change Windows ............................................................................................................................................................................ 5

Change Window Details ............................................................................................................................................................ 5Microsoft Change Notifications to Customers .................................................................................................................... 6Customer Change Notifications to Microsoft ...................................................................................................................... 6

Engaging Microsoft to Implement Changes .................................................................................................. 8Design or Service Changes ......................................................................................................................................................... 8Onsite Assistance for Customer Co-Located Equipment ................................................................................................ 8Emergency Changes in the Customer Environment ......................................................................................................... 9


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Introduction

The Microsoft Office 365 change management team directs the process and procedures related to

approval, scheduling, testing, and deployment of changes in the pre-production and production Office

365 infrastructure environments. The approach used in this service management function is built on the

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF)standards, which aligns with the change management process in most customer organizations.

This document describes the change management practices that Microsoft has adopted for Office 365

services provided under its dedicated subscription plans.* It specifically applies to the following service

offerings:

Microsoft Exchange Online Microsoft SharePoint Online Microsoft Lync Online

* Office 365 for enterprises dedicated plans are delivered from a Microsoft hosting environment where each customer has their

own dedicated data center hardware.


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Change Management Process

The production environment for Microsoft Office 365 is periodically subject to modifications due to

requirements for maintenance, security patches, customer-requested Microsoft SharePoint Online

configuration changes, and other factors. Implementing these changes may affect one or more of the

Office 365 services that are provided to the customer. The purpose of the Office 365 change managementteam is to direct the change process in an efficient and effective manner.

Request for Change Process

The change management process is driven by the Request for Change (RFC) process. Requests for change

address issues that affect the production environmentas opposed to design change requests, which

affect product design or functionality.

The change management process begins by submitting an RFC using the Microsoft RFC tool. Through a

series of decision matrices, the request is classified as having a low, medium, or high impact to the

availability, stability, or security of the service. If the request is classified as a known change type that is

either auto-approved or functionally approved, the request is not reviewed by the Change Advisory Board(CAB) or the Emergency Change Advisory Board and is deployed to production as appropriate.

Any change that is classified as having a known or high-risk impact to one of the services provided by

Office 365 is reviewed by the Change Advisory Board or the Emergency Change Advisory Board. If the

board authorizes the change, it is scheduled for deployment during an Office 365 change window. The

customer is notified five (5) business days in advance of the deployment via the Forward Schedule of

Change (FSC) notification process.

Change Windows

A change window is defined as a period of time when Microsoft deploys changes that carry a high risk of

impacting, or are known to impact, Office 365 service offerings. There are two types of change windows:

pre-established maintenance change windows that are treated as scheduled downtime for service-level

agreement (SLA) purposes, and emergency change windows that must occasionally be implemented. The

Office 365 change management team coordinates with the customer to determine a change window

schedule that has minimal business impact to the customers usersusually once a week for the duration

of one eight-hour working shift. The realized service downtime will be much shorter in duration than the

length of the entire window, typically less than 10 minutes intermittently throughout the window while

servers are rebooted or clusters are failed over.

As stated above, any service downtime that is incurred during a pre-established maintenance window is

removed from service-level agreement (SLA) reporting. If a service is impacted beyond the communicated

window, the Office 365 incident management process is initiated, and the customer is provided with the

appropriate communication.

Change Window Details

Microsoft Office 365 uses the following change windows:

Pre-established maintenance windows (scheduled downtime)o Maintenance window: Changes that are implemented during the maintenance window have

a high risk of impacting, or are known to impact, Office 365 service offerings that are

subscribed to by a customer.


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o SharePoint Online customization window: Customers have two windows each month todeploy the SharePoint Online customizations and configuration changes that they have

requested. These changes are scheduled for implementation on designated Fridays during

the customers off-business hours so that the customer can avoid conflicts with the

maintenance window changes.

Emergency windowso Emergency patch window: The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) releases security

bulletins on the second Tuesday of every month (Patch Tuesday), or as appropriate to

mitigate zero-day exploits. In the event that proof-of-concept code is publicly available

regarding a possible exploit, or if a new critical security patch is released, Microsoft is required

to apply patches to affected Office 365 systems as soon as possible to immediately remediate

the vulnerability to the customers hosted environment. During this window, the Office 365

operations team updates or patches all applicable Office 365 systems, which can result in a

brief interruption of services, typically less than 10 minutes, while servers are rebooted or

clusters are failed over.

o Emergency downtime window: In the event that an emergency change is necessary tostabilize or secure a Office 365 hosted environment, the emergency downtime windowprocess is initiated. The customers IT representatives are notified prior to the change

occurring. During this window, the realized downtime to the customer services is minimized

to the time it takes to reboot a server or to fail over a clustertypically less than 10

minutesto mitigate the emergency situation.

Microsoft implements high-risk and known Office 365 service-affecting changes during change windows

to minimize the service impact to customer organizations. All measures are taken to reduce any service

disruptions to the time it takes for a server to reboot or for a cluster to fail over, which is typically less

than 10 minutes.

Microsoft Change Notifications to Customers

Every week the Office 365 change management team sends the customers change management team

via the customer-owned and managed email distribution lista Forward Schedule of Change (FSC)

notification. The FSC notification describes the high-level details and end-user impact of the approved

changes that are scheduled for implementation in the customers hosted environment during the

upcoming change window(s).

This FSC notification process provides a minimum of five (5) business days advance notice of planned

service-impacting change activity and recaps the changes scheduled for implementation in the upcoming

change window.

Customer Change Notifications to Microsoft

The Office 365 change management team requests that the customers change management team send

an FSC notification to the Office 365 change management team that outlines any planned change activity

in the customers environment that has a potential of impacting an Office 365 service that Microsoft

provides to the customer. The notification should provide the associated details of those changes, as

understood by the customer.


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All change activity in the customer environment that is related tobut not limited tothe following items

should be communicated between the Office 365 change management team and the customers change

management team no later than three (3) business days prior to implementation.

General

Internally published change freeze calendars that the customer wants Microsoft to honor (forexample, for financial processing or global deployments).

Public and internal Domain Name System (DNS) records for Microsoft. Changes to the IP address or server name of internal DNS servers that Microsoft directs its DNS

servers to for DNS name resolution within the Customer Network.

IP address or server name changes to the customers internal domain control lers and thatMicrosoft directs its domain controllers to for authentication.

Retiring, renaming, or reassigning of the IP address of the domain controllers in the customerspreferred domain controller list.

Patching or upgrading of co-located domain controllers in the Microsoft data centers. Group Policy changes that modify the behavior of the browser settings for a customers users. Changes in the security policy regarding service and test accounts that have been assigned to

Microsoft (for example, password complexity or reset period). Firewall rules for connecting to Office 365 services. Deletion of a domain trust.

Network

All point-of-presence devices that connect to Office 365 or the Internet. All customer organization core infrastructure devices.

Microsoft Exchange Online

All changes to the customers messaging environment during the migration phase (for example,patching, upgrades, or hotfixes).

Patching, upgrading, or rebooting of any mail server (for example, Microsoft Exchange Server,Lotus, GroupWise) that acts as a bridgehead in the Microsoft Exchange Online topology.

Decommissioning of any messaging server. Deploying add-ins for the Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client to users.


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Engaging Microsoft to Implement Changes

Microsoft has an engagement model for changes that are proposed by Office 365 customers, and that are

outside normal day-to-day operations and maintenance activities. These proposed changes may be either

proactive or reactive (or both).

The engagement model for customer-proposed changes is described in the sections that follow.

Design or Service Changes

Customer proposals for a significant modification or alteration to agreed, contractually bound solution

architectures, designs, or service packages must be reviewed and approved through established Microsoft

channels. Those change proposals that may degrade Office 365 service performance, affect the ability of

either Microsoft or the customer organization to meet operating-level agreement (OLA) and service-level

agreement (SLA) commitments, or affect obligations concerning the cost of goods sold.

Generally, Microsoft strictly manages changes by minimizing one-time requests from customers and

focusing on new features that can provide benefits to all customers. To evaluate, manage, and implement

customer change requests, Microsoft uses the well-defined processes set forth in the Customer RequestAnalysis System (CRAS). Customers should contact their Office 365 resource to obtain supporting

documents that describe CRAS.

CRAS is not used for customer break-fix issues or issues that affect any Office 365 service offerings. Any

issue that has an impact on an Office 365 service offering should be managed through standard support

escalation processes.

Onsite Assistance for Customer Co-Located Equipment

Co-located equipment is defined as customer-owned and managed assets (hardware or software) that are

located within Microsoft managed facilities or at Microsoft leased spaces in third-party managed facilities.

The customer or customers carrier is responsible for monitoring their co-located equipment and

responding to events and incidents. Microsoft anticipates that from time to time an event will occur that

requires physical access to customer-owned co-located hardware in order to make a repair that cannot be

made remotely by the customer. In such an event that remote hands services or direct access is required,

the customers authorized contact should contact the Microsoft service desk at any time (24 hours a day,

7 days a week) to initiate the physical access process.

Some hardware issues can be addressed by remote hands work without the need for the customer to

send someone onsite. For example, a Microsoft technician may be able to repair simple hardware issues

that do not require being logged on the server such as rack and unrack a device, change out a failed

drive, run and remove cable, connect and disconnect a device, or power cycle a device.

For issues that cannot be addressed remotely or with remote hands, the customer must submit anescalation request to Microsoft for the customers vendor or carrier to gain access to the site. After the

request is received, Microsoft requires no additional information. The customers contact will have access

to the site if they report within the specified window of time with a valid government ID. The customer

should address all follow-up requests for information regarding work completed directly to the carrier or

vender who performed the work.


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Emergency Changes in the Customer Environment

If an emergency or non-communicated change in the customers corporate environment affects the

availability of or connectivity to an Office 365 service that is hosted by Microsoft, the customer should

engage the Microsoft service desk by email (if available) or phone as soon as possible; the service desk is

available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Documents

Change Management Service Description_Office 365 Dedicated Plans_October 2011