What is a Microsoft Workshop and what value does it provide to my organization?

Workshops

Microsoft educational workshops come in a wide variety ranging from 1-5 day engagements that can be delivered onsite at your location, delivered remotely exclusively for your team, delivered remotely or with open enrollment along-side other customers. Workshops are deep technical training on specific Microsoft workloads and issues.  Click here to see a sample of the technical delivery overview for one of our most popular Workshops.  A complete list of currently available Premier Workshops is available upon request.

RAP as a Service is a proactive service delivered by a Microsoft accredited engineer to diagnose potential issues with your environment on the Microsoft technology of your choice. It is an automated assessment of a Microsoft technology implementation, with data collected and analyzed remotely by Microsoft to create a finding report on the health of your environment and remediation recommendations. Generic services are placeholder services for the technology of your choice. Click here to see a sample of the technical delivery for one of our most popular Risk Assessments for Active Directory. Click here to download the Risk Assessment PDF. A complete list of currently available Premier Risk Assessments is available upon request.

What is Problem Resolution Support?

Problem Resolution Support (PRS): Reactive Services

In the event a technical issue arises, your Premier Support team ensures you receive the priority support you need for a quick recovery from a Microsoft Engineer. Problem resolution services ensure that your critical issues receive our attention until they are resolved — and your business is up and running. Your IT staff can spend less time putting out fires and more time helping to maximize the productive use of your technology. PRS Support includes:

• Critical situation management
• Covers all Microsoft products, including cloud services
• On Premises, Cloud and Hybrid support
• 24 hours a day, seven days a week expert assistance for technical problems—by phone and on site
• Support escalation to the highest level necessary, delivered through a streamlined, critical issue management process led by an escalation engineer
• Response time for critical problems is one hour or less, and we will continue to work on it 24/7 until we resolve it
• Reactive on-site support is available with senior escalation engineers to solve your most complex IT issues (based on contract terms and escalation thresholds)
• Priority access to hotfixes and critical product updates—enables preparation for deployment
• You may request an in-depth investigation into the root cause of your issue to help prevent reoccurrence
• For lower priority issues, you can request reactive on-site support services (ROSS) with highly experienced technical resources
• Advisory services provide consultative support on short term (typically 6 hours or less) and unplanned issues. Advisory services include advice and guidance in relation to infrastructure, development, and deployment issues
• Development support assistance helps you create and develop applications on the Microsoft platform that integrate Microsoft technologies. Development support assistance specializes in Microsoft development tools and technologies

Think about what it would cost you to engage an expert on Azure, Exchange, or any technology to come in and help you. You would have to find a partner, purchase a minimum of their time, and go through your procurement process all to simply set up an advisory call to see if this is the direction you want to go and get some guidance. With the Advisory Package, you receive a Technical Account Manager that can find resources for you and schedule advisory calls on a per hour basis with Microsoft subject matter expert on any specific technology. Rather than getting the funding for each specific call, you can now use your current hours to engage with an expert and not have to worry about the procurement process for each request.

Think about what it would cost you to engage an expert on Azure, Exchange, or any technology to come in and help you. You would have to find a partner, purchase a minimum of their time, and go through your procurement process all to simply set up an advisory call to see if this is the direction you want to go and get some guidance. With the Taste of Premier Package, you receive a Technical Account Manager that can find resources for you and schedule advisory calls on a per hour basis with Microsoft subject matter expert on any specific technology. Rather than getting the funding for each specific call, you can now use your current hours to engage with an expert and not have to worry about the procurement process for each request.

What is Support Assistance?

Support Assistance (SA): Proactive Services

Microsoft Premier Services are not just a reactive service for when business critical IT functions go wrong—it is Lifecycle Management service designed for prevention, planning, and optimization. This is what we refer to as Services Management and is the base of our methodology that focuses on the larger picture of how our technology fits within your business environment.

Support Assistance hours are Proactive hours that can be used towards hundreds of specialized Educational, Operational and Assessment based Microsoft offerings to deliver strategic value to your staff. Proactive Services are designed to find and address problems before they disrupt critical business processes; increase operational efficiency; reduce downtime; provide planning, migration and design reviews for smoother, upgrades, migrations and daily operations; educate staff to increase technical expertise and efficiency; and free up IT staff to focus on strategic business initiatives rather than reactive disruptions to business.

I don’t see what I’m looking for. Are there other support offerings available through TribalValue and Microsoft Premier?

Premier Support Add-Ons:

Yes! Microsoft’s Premier Support catalogue is constantly evolving to provide the growing support services that our customers need to cover their on premises, Cloud and hybrid environments. Beyond the brief overview provided above, Microsoft’s Premier catalogue includes over 700 educational, assessment, operational, development, cloud, remote, onsite and customized engagements to meet the unique requirements of our Enterprise customers. If you have additional inquiries about specific support needs, please reach out to Bradley Fulp at Microsoft to find the right Premier Support offering for your needs, including custom offerings.

What is a Microsoft Activate and what value does it provide to my organization?

Activates

Premier Support Activates are varied multi-day engagements to introduce the basics around activating your elected technology, provides guidance and education for your IT engineers, educate around Microsoft best practices and support initial workload deployments. Activates vary in time, depth and technology and help enhance your team’s technical skills to drive operational readiness. They can include Onboarding session developed with a Microsoft engineer and working Proof of Concept (PoC) on your environment. Click here to see a sample of the technical delivery overview for one of our most popular Activates for Azure. A complete list of currently available Premier Activates is available upon request.

What is a Microsoft Health Check and what value does it provide to my organization?

Health Check

Microsoft Health Check provides critical insight into the health, consistency and performance of elected Microsoft technology. This multi-day engagement leverages the expertise of Microsoft’s Premier Field Engineers, who use tools to collect data and server metrics to analyze key aspects of your deployment. Analysis is focused on maximizing scalability, reliability, performance and health following Microsoft best practices. Relevant settings are verified as consistent across the farm for the given hardware in use, thus allowing you to extract the most for your investment. Health Checks are delivered as a highly interactive engagement, complete with documentation, reports, and prescriptive guidance from a Microsoft Engineer based on the reported findings. Although the engagement involves a considerable amount of knowledge transfer, it is not a training course. Click here to see a sample of the technical delivery overview for one of our most popular Health Checks. A complete list of currently available Premier Health Checks is available upon request.

What is a Cyber threat PoP-SLAM and what value does it provide to my organization?

Cyber Threat PoP-SLAM (Securing Lateral Account Movement)

As the tools and techniques employed in modern credential theft attacks evolve, attackers are finding it easier to achieve their goals through widely known and commonly used attack vectors. Credential theft and reuse as a means for lateral movement between systems is arguably the most commonly used vector in most organizational compromises. This Proactive Operations Program (POP) will teach attendees a defense-in-depth strategy to guard against lateral traversal, a key aspect of this attack technique. Proactive Operations Program – Securing Lateral Account Movement (POP-SLAM) is a three-day engagement with a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer working alongside the customer’s security and Active Directory staff. The deliverables will consist of training, knowledge transfer and implementation of the recommended mitigations in a customer provided lab. Optionally, a customer may choose to perform a basic implementation in their production environment after testing in a lab environment. Click here to see a sample of the technical delivery overview for Microsoft’s Cyber threat reduction PoP-SLAM. A complete list of currently available Premier Pop-SLAMs is available upon request.

What is Account Management, Service Delivery management or my Technical Account Manager?

Service Delivery

With Premier Services you will be assigned a Microsoft Premier Technical Account Manager (TAM) who acts as a trusted business advisor for your environment and aligns to your priorities to maximize the business value of your Microsoft investment. TAMs are Microsoft Certified Professionals who have immense understanding of Microsoft Operating Environments and who also understand your business priorities, the role Microsoft products play in your organization, and will help you plan to prevent problems and reduce your support costs. TAMs are responsible for delivering the service levels purchased in your Premier agreement both for proactive engagements you’d like to schedule and for reactive cases when you need help prioritizing, escalating, coordinating and getting to the right Microsoft resource to have the issue resolved. They are your advocate and advisor throughout the contract life-cycle to ensure you receive the total value of Premier.

Service Delivery can include the following depending on the scope of the contract and services elected:

• Service introductions are scheduled by your TAM at the beginning of the contract period and introduce the support services scope to your teams.
• The service delivery plan forms the basis of your Premier Support services developed in close collaboration with your TAM.
• Service reviews for past period’s services, report achievements, monitor your satisfaction level, and discuss any required actions or adjustments.
• Incident management & escalation to drive timely resolution
• Crisis management provides 24×7 issue ownership & communication
• Needs assessment conducted to build an actionable plan to reach the desired state of your IT environment
• Remediation planning addresses future needs based on the findings from the proactive assessments
• Microsoft product/online services lifecycle awareness
• Incident trend analysis and advice
• Process guidance on recommended practices and environmental optimization