Microsoft Premier Support for Lync^TM Partners: Certification Process & Requirements

Requirements

Certification of your organization to provide escalation cases for Lync Voice is a contractual obligation of the ‘Premier Support for Lync Partners’ offer.

To become certified, a partner needs to meet eligibility, organization and individual level prerequisite criteria, and maintain certification compliance on an ongoing basis.The table below summarizes the different criteria that a partner must fulfill in order to become certified and maintain certification

Criteria	Description	Details
Eligibility	Eligibility criteria required to enroll in the program	Gold Communications Competency partner in the Microsoft Partner Network
Initial Certification - Individual pre-requisites	Individual pre-requisites	Each prospective Support Engineer and Depth Support Engineer must meet eligibility criteria to attend training. See the Training section of this website for details
Initial Certification – Organization level pre-requisites	Staffing level	Supply intended Support Engineer and Depth Support Engineer staffing model for each time zone that you are intending to support There is a minimum recommended staffing level based on number time zones, SLA, response times and languages being supported
	Incident Management	A partner must be able to provide the following attributes with every support escalation: a unique customer Access ID Company Name Product Problem description (for routing purposes) Impact description (for severity purposes) a named contact or a group associated with the access ID
Ongoing compliance	Routine Compliance	Periodic review of compliance including: Review the support staffing model Support escalation quality
Ongoing compliance	CSAT	Agree to allow collection of general Customer Satisfaction on a periodic basis.

Process – How does my company become certified?

The certification can be achieved by following the process detailed in the steps below.

The certification process commences with a conversation with your Specialist Business Development Manager (SBDM) who will work with you to determine eligibility of your company for certification.

Certification Process and Requirements