This section discusses the planning decisions and other prerequisites that should be in place prior to using the Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) Deployment Tool to install MPS provisioning components in your environment. It also provides pointers to supporting or related documentation and includes some brief introductory information about the capabilities of the Deployment Tool.

Prior to using the MPS Deployment Tool to distribute and configure MPS provisioning components in your hosted services environment, you should have already established which hosted services you are offering and the provisioning components necessary to support them. If you have not, then you should first determine which hosted services you will be providing and then identify the provisioning components that you will need to install with the MPS Deployment Tool to support provisioning facilities for these services.

For additional related information, see:

• Evaluate Provisioning Implementations to learn how to customize provisioning component implementations for your environment.
  
• Advanced Service Provisioning Topics to review the minimal and advanced service provisioning environment configurations in which you can deploy MPS.
  
• Choose MPS Deployment Options to assess various MPS deployment scenarios.
  

After you are certain about which provisioning components you will be installing, proceed to the remaining topics in this section:

• MPS Deployment Tool Capabilities - for a brief discussion about the capabilities of the tool.
  
• MPS Deployment Tool Task Summary to find out about "getting started" guidance that is provided by the tool.
  

For more information, see:

• Provision Hosted Services to learn how to use MPS to provision Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, and Office Communication Service