Support and Service Management Service Description

Transcription

1 Support and Service Management Service Description Business Productivity Online Suite - Standard Microsoft Exchange Online Standard Microsoft SharePoint Online Standard Microsoft Office Communications Online Standard Microsoft Office Live Meeting Published: March 2010 For the latest information, see

2 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 Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Active Directory, and SharePoint are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 2

3 Contents Introduction... 4 Standard Support Framework... 5 Terms... 5 Support Teams... 5 Team Responsibilities... 6 Customer Responsibilities... 6 Microsoft Responsibilities... 6 Support Availability... 7 Issue Submission and Escalation Path Overview... 7 Support Tools and Technologies... 9 Escalation and Service Requests... 9 Root Cause Analysis... 9 Escalation Severity... 9 Severity 1 and A Incident Response Management Enhanced Support Experience with Microsoft Premier Support Services and Microsoft Consulting Services Phase 1: Discovery and High-Level Solution Development Phase 2: Workstream Integration and In-Depth Solution Development Phase 3: Pilot Support Phase 4. Migration Support Phase 5: Run-State Support Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 3

4 Introduction The Microsoft Online Services support teams are committed to helping customers quickly and efficiently resolve service-related issues that end users may encounter when using Microsoft Online Services. Microsoft Online Services support activities include the following: Help customers integrate Microsoft Online Services support with customer IT operations. Microsoft Online Services support teams provide phone and Web-based support channels that enable the customer's Information Technology (IT) professional staff to integrate support for Microsoft Online Services into its existing operations. Respond to issues that escalate from the customer. Microsoft Online Services support teams help resolve service-related issues that cannot be resolved by the customer IT staff. Record, track, and communicate support issue status. Microsoft Online Services support teams who are working on high-priority and escalated issues provide, record, and communicate the status of each issue to the customer until the issue is resolved, service is restored, or the incident is closed. Improve customer satisfaction with support services. Microsoft Online Services support teams are continually working to improve customer satisfaction by monitoring and evaluating support service metrics and internal processes. This document describes the support services that are provided for the following Microsoft Online Services products: Microsoft Exchange Online Standard Microsoft SharePoint Online Standard Microsoft Office Communications Online Standard Microsoft Office Live Meeting Additional documents describing Microsoft Online Services Standard products and services are also available. Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 4

5 Standard Support Framework The Microsoft Online Services support framework relies on Microsoft support teams that are trained to assist the customer IT and support staff in successfully resolving support issues. Terms The following terms are relevant to the Microsoft Online Services support framework: Issue Submission: Referring an issue to a higher support tier for a specific action or actions. Examples are transferring an issue from the customer to the Microsoft support teams for further investigation, or obtaining customization requests, special permissions, or tools. Incident escalation: IT staff escalating a support issue to a Microsoft Online Services support team using an online submission form (via the Microsoft Online Administration Center portal) or a phone call to the support team (866-MSONLINE) to log and document the issue. When the contact is initiated, a Microsoft Online Services support team engineer creates a support service request. Knowledge base portal: An online portal that Microsoft support teams provide for the customer IT staff, which includes an inventory of known issues and resolution steps. The customer IT staff has access to the inventory of content resources when helping resolve end-user support issues. The online portal (also referred to as forums) is regularly updated to provide support guidance for new issues or revisions to existing support solutions. In addition to content articles and how-to guides, this portal contains step-by-step video content that illustrates how to resolve several highvolume issues. Support Teams The Microsoft Online Services support organization is composed of support engineers from several technology disciplines. Together they provide a seamless set of support services to Online Services customers and have overarching accountability for end-to-end issue response and management. The following groups play important functions in Microsoft support operations: The customer s service desk takes incoming calls directly from customer end users who are seeking support. The service desk may be staffed by call center staff, on-site technicians, or subject matter experts. The customer s service desk operation may also include an internal support issue escalation process that occurs before escalating issues to Microsoft. A delegated administrator for the customer enables a managed service partner to perform administrative tasks on behalf of the customer with a single log-in. The customer can grant the partner administrative access without creating an account for the partner and using up a seat from the customer subscription pool. This is an optional fee-based offering from Microsoft Online Services partners. Microsoft Consulting Services and Microsoft Premier Support Services provide on-site support and consulting services during piloting, deployment, and run-state operation. A variety of support levels are available to meet the needs of our customers, at additional cost. The Microsoft Online Services Global Technical Support team manages the overall call center operations and issue resolution workflows that are initiated by the customer IT staff, delegated administrator, or Microsoft Premier Support Services. This team typically consists of engineers who have advanced training on issues specific to a service. Additionally, this team has permissions and support tools that may not available to the customer staff. The team also serves as an escalation entry point for service issues that arise from the customer support organization. The Microsoft Service Operation Center is responsible for monitoring and maintaining the Microsoft Online Services infrastructure. This center includes, but is not limited to, Microsoft Active Directory service support, data center operations, and global network operations centers. Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 5

6 Team Responsibilities Customer Responsibilities Customer IT staff have the following support responsibilities: Microsoft may provide customer IT staff with certain support and diagnostic tools from time to time to perform problem determination and resolution activities. Prior to escalating to Microsoft, the customer IT staff will leverage these tools as appropriate to resolve issues during troubleshooting phases. Customer will respond to satisfaction surveys provided by Microsoft from time to time regarding Microsoft services. Customer IT will generally resolve the majority of end-user issues, including but not limited to: Issues that can be resolved by reference to Microsoft how-to articles and FAQs Software and account configuration. Client connectivity. Client desktop software. Performance issues within the customer's span of control. Service availability issues within the customer's span of control. Microsoft Responsibilities Microsoft Online Services support teams are responsible for a number of specific support functions and activities. Support teams provide the following services to the customer IT: Create support service requests. Troubleshoot, manage, and resolve customer issues and escalations. Gather and validate information related to specific escalations. Transmit service request information to the customer IT staff. Provide issue coordination and resolution management. Escalate problems to other Microsoft support groups if needed or appropriate. Maintain communication with the customer IT staff, and provide status updates throughout the problem resolution process. Microsoft Online Services support teams are responsible for developing the following support resources for the customer IT staff: Support process documentation Troubleshooting guides Microsoft Online Services knowledge base documents Microsoft will provide customer with such documentation and tools as Microsoft deems appropriate, to assist customer IT in delivering support services to customer end users. Such content and tools will be provided primarily in English, with localized language resources available as the offering grows globally. Unless otherwise provided in Microsoft documentation or accepted by Microsoft, support incidents that relate to the following causes are not covered by this service description: customer networking infrastructure; hardware; Microsoft on-premises software that is not part of the Online Services offering; non-microsoft software; operational procedures; architecture; IT service management process errors, system configuration errors, or human error. Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 6

7 Support Availability Microsoft Online Services support teams are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Support services are available in English and limited live engineer language based support. Translations services for a majority of global languages are available on an as-needed basis. Issue Submission and Escalation Path Overview The Microsoft Online Services support framework establishes an appropriate level of interaction between the customer IT staff and the Microsoft Online Services support teams. Escalation of customer issues begins with the customer IT staff and, if necessary, continues through other support tiers until resolution is achieved. Figure 1 illustrates the escalation and communication pathways among the end user, the customer IT staff, and Microsoft support services. Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 7

8 Issue Resolved? Yes Case Closed No End User Customer or Partner IT Staff Immediate Live Support Required? Yes No 866-MSONLINE MOAC Service Request Created T1/T2 Engineer Issue Resolved? Yes Case Closed No Microsoft Internal Teams Escalation Operations Yes No Issue Resolved? Engineering Yes Figure 1. Escalation and communication pathways for Microsoft Online Services customers Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 8

9 Support Tools and Technologies Microsoft support engineers and technicians utilize a spectrum of tools and technologies for support and troubleshooting purposes. These include the following: Incident tracking and management system. Gathers information about an end-user escalation or server alert. The system records problem routing and escalation, and identifies characteristics of the problems and resolutions. Microsoft Online Services knowledge base. Helps support engineers determine and resolve issues by providing a pre-populated catalog of known issues and resolution steps. The knowledge base provides support engineers with a collective and evolving solution bank. Microsoft Online Services Support teams regularly update the knowledge base to ensure accuracy. In addition, the Microsoft Online Services support team has access to procedural and process documentation for a wide variety of standard and special support practices. Microsoft Online Services also provides a set of administration tools to the customer IT staff. These tools allow the customer IT to perform a number of service administration functions directly, without contacting Microsoft Online Services support team. Escalation and Service Requests A service request specific to a support issue is created when a support issue is escalated from the customer IT and accepted by the Microsoft Online Services support team. In the service request management process, each escalated issue is assigned a unique service request number for tracking purposes. The customer receives status updates about the service request throughout the service request life cycle via or telephone. Microsoft Online Services support engineers are able to resolve the majority of issues and problems that they are assigned. Issues and problems that cannot be resolved by the support engineers are escalated to higher levels of support, other Microsoft teams, and in some cases third-party providers. If an issue is escalated to a higher support tier, support engineers are responsible for customer communications. Root Cause Analysis Root cause analysis (RCA) can be requested by a customer for a single-user case (outside of the standard post-incident review process; see details in "Severity 1 and A Incident Response Management" below) when the resolution to an issue is not documented in the Microsoft Online Services knowledge base. Microsoft evaluates RCA requests on a case-by-case basis and decides whether there s a valid need for the analysis. If a RCA is initiated, support engineers may conduct extended troubleshooting with the customer support teams. This process may include gathering client-side logs, and attempting to reproduce the issue in a test environment. Although root cause analysis frequently causes a delay in resolution, the process usually has the valuable side effects of improving the knowledge base and initiating help-desk changes and additions to the customer-focused training modules. Escalation Severity Microsoft will prioritize support incidents consistent with the severity level provided by the customer, and offers the definitions set in Table 1 below as a guideline. The customer may request a change in severity level at any time through the life of the support incident by contacting the Microsoft Online Services support team. Table 1 details the responsiveness both Microsoft and the customer, and ongoing communications targets, based on the severity of a given problem. Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 9

10 Table 1. Service Request Severity Assignments Severity Level Definition Initial Response Time Communication Goal 1 Catastrophic Catastrophic business impact in which a service, system, network, server, or critical application is down, impacting production or profitability. Multiple users or customers lose complete functionality of all services. 15 minutes Microsoft updates customer every hour or via live conference bridge; customer updates Microsoft every hour or via live conference bridge. This level of severity agreement is applicable 365 days per year, including weekends and holidays. A Critical Critical business impact in which service, production, operations, or development deadlines are severely impacted, or where there will be a severe impact on production or profitability. Multiple customers, users, or services are partially affected. 1 hour Microsoft updates customer every two hours; customer updates Microsoft every two hours. This level of severity agreement is applicable 365 days per year, including weekends and holidays. B Urgent Moderate business impact. Significant problem where use of the service is proceeding, but in an impaired fashion. Single user, customer, or service is partially affected. All mail flow issues are considered urgent, regardless of number of users affected. 2 hours Microsoft updates customer every day. This level of severity agreement is applicable 365 days per year, including weekends and holidays. C Important Minimum business impact. Important issue, but does not have significant current service or productivity impact for the customer. Single user is experiencing partial impact. 4 hours Microsoft updates customer every three days. This level of severity agreement is applicable on all business days. Holy days and weekends are excluded. D Advisory Used for design change requests (DCRs), feature requests, research activities, and similar items. 48 hours Updates customer as necessary or agreed upon. Severity 1 and A Incident Response Management Microsoft Online Services has a formal process for responding to Severity 1 or A incidents that affect service availability. The goal of this process is to minimize service outage time, and success is reflected in performance against the availability SLAs. Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 10

11 Microsoft Online Services classifies incidents that have potential to impact service availability as Severity 1 or A incidents (see Table 1). If a service outage occurs, information regarding the outage is gathered and sent to stakeholders, operations teams, key technology contacts, and impacted users. As part of its incidence response, the Microsoft Online Services incident management team takes the following steps: Sends an outage notification via RSS feed. If it is determined that Microsoft needs to resolve the incident, the impact of the incident is appropriately reviewed and assessed. Within the time specified in Table 1 of Microsoft receiving the request, the Microsoft Online Services incident management team sends a notification to the audience that is designated by the customer, covering details of the incident, its impact, and an expected time of resolution. Further communications are sent every hour for the duration of the incident, as scheduled by the Microsoft Online Services incident management team, or whenever new and relevant information is available. Resolves the incident. Microsoft Online Services continues to work on the incident until resolution is in place or a work-around is established. Microsoft may need to engage the customer over the phone, by , or through a conference call or bridge call, to assist in troubleshooting or validation to bring the service back to normal operation. If a bridge call is required, Microsoft provides a phone number and participant code. After the resolution gets validated, Microsoft Online Services sends an outage resolution alert to the customer. Deliver a post-incident review document. Upon customer request, a post-incident review document (PIR) is created and published for all incidents that impact service-level availability and are resolved by Microsoft Online Services. (A PIR is not created for a single-user issue.) The PIR is delivered by Microsoft Online Services to the customer within seven (7) business days of the resolution of the incident. The report includes an executive summary, a timeline of the major events that occurred during the incident, and a list of the action items that were determined to address the root cause of the issue. Customer PIR requests for non-sla impacting incidents that had significant business impact will be evaluated on a per-incident basis. Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 11

12 Enhanced Support Experience with Microsoft Premier Support Services and Microsoft Consulting Services At additional fee, Microsoft Premier Support Services and Microsoft Consulting Services can work with the customer support organization to develop processes and procedures to support Microsoft Online Services at the customer organization. Support integration between Microsoft and the customer covers the scope of service support in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Microsoft Online Services partners may also provide similar services. The integration process typically occurs in five phases. Phase 1: Discovery and High-Level Solution Development This first phase is completed through discovery discussions that are held between a Microsoft Online Services or Microsoft Partner deployment manager and the customer. The discovery for support and operations integration requires the following three sessions: IT general discussion IT and incident management breakout discussion Change and release management breakout discussion Phase 2: Workstream Integration and In-Depth Solution Development This phase involves in-depth discussion about how to best prepare the customer to work with Microsoft Online Services support teams. Microsoft Online Services and the customer complete the following: 1. Finalize support development efforts, including creation and publishing of the knowledge base, escalation templates, and help-desk training materials. 2. Finalize the support agreement that establishes the relationship between the customer and the Microsoft Online Services incident management team. To properly address these items and track project deliverables, weekly workstream meetings are scheduled between the deployment manager and the customer key support service stakeholders. A project plan should be developed and tracked throughout this process to ensure that clear timelines for each item are completed before the pilot support phase. Phase 3: Pilot Support The pilot support phase occurs while a customer is deploying Microsoft Online Services to a subset of its end user base. The length of the pilot phase depends on the number of services being deployed. During this phase, the Microsoft client support operations manager and related Microsoft service managers begin to collaborate with the customer and initiate the support processes that have been developed. This phase provides the time to solidify the support partnership, identify areas to adapt support processes, and ensure that the customer is fully prepared to deliver support services. Phase 4. Migration Support The migration support phase occurs when the customer on-premises business applications are migrating to the Microsoft Online Services environment. During the migration support phase, the escalations and support processes are reviewed, and there is continued focus on stabilizing the processes. Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 12

13 Phase 5: Run-State Support The run-state support phase follows migration, when the customer is set up and working with Microsoft Online Services. The length of this phase is determined by the length of the service subscription that is purchased by the customer and with Microsoft Consulting Services or one of the Microsoft Partners. Microsoft works to ensure continued improvement and customer satisfaction with Microsoft Online Services technical and non-technical support services. The team promotes effective and efficient issue resolution by monitoring and evaluating service metrics and internal processes. The roles and procedures that are used by Microsoft Online Services in its service level management (SLM) practices include the following: Online Services resource. A key customer contact who provides service account management for the Online Services that the customer has licensed. The Online Services resource is the individual who helps coordinates interactions between the customer and Microsoft Online Services teams, including the deployment team, account team, support team, and other Microsoft service teams. Where possible, Online Services resources incorporate their Microsoft Online Services responsibilities into their existing business relationship with the customer. Incident and escalation management. Assists the customer with technical and non-technical support issues, acting as the interface between Microsoft Online Services and the customer. Microsoft Online Services has a formal process for responding to incidents that impact service availability. (See "Severity 1 and A Incident Response Management" earlier in this document.) Meetings and reporting: Establishes a regular schedule of meetings to ensure strong communications (for example, monthly business reviews). Provides standard monthly service reports to the internal Microsoft teams. Collaborates with customers, partners, and internal Microsoft teams to develop service improvement plans when necessary. Standard change requests. Works within the established Microsoft Online Services support framework to coordinate standard change requests. Service review meetings. A regularly scheduled series of meetings for reviewing services. Reviews include support services practices and processes, and the adherence to these practices and processes by support engineers. The Online Services resource organizes service review meetings to help provide relevant information about service operations, and to discuss any issues that arise In all other matters, the Online Services resource works with the customer, partner, or other appropriate Microsoft resources to develop a proposal to fulfill the customer request. The roles and procedures are further defined during the assessment phase of the service delivery process, and they are reviewed periodically to ensure proper effectiveness. Microsoft reserves the right to make changes to these roles and procedures at any time. Microsoft Online Services Support and Service Management Service Description 13