As cloud services and Office 365 in general continue to gain popularity, I find myself talking to more and more organizations who are looking to make use of these services. One of the challenges I come up against most often is the issue of workstation readiness and how many organizations tend to overlook the importance or simply glance over that section in the enablement plan. One of the great things about Microsoft Online Services is the rapid innovation and how quickly new features and brought to market. Unfortunately this also seems to catch many organizations off-guard.

I’m sure we can all agree that a workstation refresh project for even a small customer is a big undertaking and I’ve seen many Office 365 projects stall for a very long time due to workstation readiness and/or workstation refresh projects. As always, a thorough analysis and due diligence is required to ensure that all workstations in the fleet meet the published minimum requirements in order to ensure the best possible user experience. I’ve seen a whole lot of old and out of date information floating around so I thought I would put together a quick post to spell out the current requirements. In the past, there was a complex table that listed specific updates required by specific software versions and due dates, but thankfully Microsoft has recently simplified this list. In order to provide the best user experience, Office 365 is designed to work with:

• The current or immediately previous version of Internet Explorer or Firefox, or the latest version of Chrome or Safari.
• Any version of Microsoft Office in mainstream support.

The above list and additional information is published here. Using this guidance, the current workstation readiness requirements are:

• Internet Explorer 10 or 11 (The current or immediately previous version of Firefox, or the latest version of Chrome or Safari -  I never keep track of those because they change so frequently!)
• Microsoft Office 2010 or 2013

Still using Internet Explorer 8 or 9? How about Microsoft Office 2007? These versions are no longer officially supported by Microsoft and although Microsoft does not recommend using these older browsers and clients, the service won’t deliberately prevent these browsers and clients from connecting, but the user experience cannot be guaranteed in the longer term.

I am a firm believer that projects fail because of end-user perception, if users have a degraded experience they are likely to overlook all the cool new features and functionality you are providing. No matter how quickly you can pilot, deploy and migrate to Office 365, I strongly suggest spending some time analyzing your current workstation fleet to to ensure that your users have the best possible user experience.