Also, include time reserved for planned maintenance that is to be not part of the SLA whether you use it or not. Unless they’re willing to pay significant amounts extra you will have them. Service Packs, 3rd party application roll outs, network changes, etc. Planned outages should be mentioned as a ‘not counted against SLA item’. If you don't document this as a definition or call out, guaranteed some manager/user is going to whine about it in every meeting with a hammer until the end of time.
Even though our “SLA’s” are if it’s down it’s on fire, we have maintenance Windows defined for us to ‘do things’ where as long as we have announced it in advanced, they can’t hold it against us. With various products there are ways to design them to minimize and mitigate any impact, but you should still have some call out for it. Steven From: Candee Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2015 8:58 AM To: [email protected] Argh! Guess who's *also* the Lync guru?? Thanks you guys - just a lot to wrap my head around! I will ask all these questions at the next meeting and see what responses I get. We are a largish org (part of an even larger org), which is why they're looking for SLAs, I think. They want us in the running to be the datacenter in North America. Thanks again! On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 10:17 AM, Michael B. Smith <[email protected]> wrote: Exchange (and Lync to a certain degree) are tough. What does “not working” mean? Does it include client workstations or does the SLA end at the perimeter of the data-center? Or does it end with your LAN? Your WAN? Does it include work-from-home? Does it include receiving email from outside? Does it include sending email to the outside? Does it include OWA? Does it include UM, POP, IMAP, EAS, and EWS? What if every single thing is “working”, except you can’t send email to one particular domain – is Exchange “down?” If you pushed a change to the auto-attendant this morning and it is missing part of a decision tree so you can’t leave voicemail, is Exchange “down?” Does it include AV and AS? What is a false positive considered? What is a false negative considered? Definitions are important. J Just to monitor Exchange completely is a significant undertaking. Much less to come up with appropriate operational objectives for a given company… I’ve been through this process before with a couple of largish organizations. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Raper Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2015 9:35 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [Exchange] SLAs What are the business objectives driving the request for SLAs? Does the business have specific objectives, expectations, or requirements that they're trying to meet or was this just an open-ended "we want you to come up with SLA's for Exchange"? Jonathan Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone -------- Original message -------- From: Candee Date:05/14/2015 9:31 AM (GMT-05:00) To: [email protected] Subject: [Exchange] SLAs Morning! I've been tasked with creating SLAs for our Exchange environment. Does anyone have a favorite template I could use as a jumping off point? Thanks, Candee
