Understand phases and sections (Baseline, Standard, Advanced)
The guide groups recommendations into three deployment phases aligned to Microsoft 365 Education licensing. Each phase includes guidance across the same five sections so you can cover the major areas of a tenant rollout consistently.
The three phases
| Phase | License alignment | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline | A1 | Recommended foundational settings and core service configuration. |
| Standard | A3 | Builds on Baseline and introduces A3 capabilities across identity, apps, security, and devices. |
| Advanced | A5 | Builds on Baseline + Standard and adds extended security and compliance services. |
The five sections in every phase
- Tenant setup: base tenant configuration, key admin, and service setup.
- Identity: identity architecture and provisioning considerations (for example, sync and school information system (SIS)/School Data Sync (SDS) scenarios).
- Applications: configuration guidance for services commonly used in education (for example, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange Online).
- Security and compliance: recommended security configurations aligned to your licensing.
- Devices: onboarding and managing devices (for example, using Intune for Education for mobile device management (MDM)/mobile application management (MAM).