Bet you didn’t know that office 365 had its own Best Practices Analyser (BPA) that can check your setup. We’ll here’s how to run it.
Firstly, login into you Office 365 portal as an administrator.
Select tools at the bottom of the menu on the left hand side as shown.
Currently the second item under Checks on the right is the BPA. Select this hyperlink to continue.
You’ll then need to accept the End User Agreement for a number of software packages that will be installed on your system.
These updates will then be downloaded to your workstation.
The downloaded software packages will then be installed. Some of these include the .NET Framework 4.5,
Windows Management Framework 3.0.
You’ll then need to reboot.
After logging back in, the installation will continue.
You’ll also get the latest Windows azure AD module for PowerShell.
When all the prerequisites have been installed you’ll then be prompted to install the BPA.
It will download some more files.
You’ll have to agree to another End User Agreement.
Once installed you can then run the BPA.
You can run the BPA as the currently logged in user (if any) or specify a different set of credentials.
You now start a new scan.
Provide the login details to Office 365. I would suggest that this needs to be an Office 365 Global Administration account.
Wait a few moments while the scan runs.
And finally get the results.
Which you can expand for more detail as shown above.
You can also elect to save the results to a HTML file on your system for later analysis.
Remembering that this software is still beta I would have to say that it currently takes too long to get the results from the BPA. You really need something that is quick. I understand that it needs a lot of current software to run its tests and on many existing Office 365 systems that software will already be in place, significantly shorting the set up time. However, I would still like to see the process shortened.
Try it out for yourself and see what you think!
