Microsoft Announces New Cloud Services to Help Customers Move to a Modern Desktop Experience

IT is complex. That means it can be difficult to meet the day-to-day demands of your business, let alone the technological innovation that drives the business forward. In desktop management, this is especially true: the process of creating standard images, deploying devices, testing updates, and supporting end users has not changed much in the last few years. years. Modern desktop not only provides end users with the most productive and secure computing experience, it also saves time and money

In order to help businesses move towards Microsoft’s vision of a modern desktop, powered by Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus, the company has three announcements:

• Cloud-based analytics tools to further facilitate the deployment of modern workstations.


• A program to ensure application compatibility for Windows and Office updates and updates.


• Maintenance and support changes to give you additional deployment flexibility.

Analytics to facilitate the deployment of modern desktops

An essential part of any desktop deployment plan is the analysis of existing applications. The process of testing applications and solving problems has always been very manual and time consuming. Microsoft 365 provides tools to help customers choose a modern desktop, including System Center Configuration Manager, Microsoft Intune, Windows Analytics, and the Office Readiness Toolkit.

In yesterday’s release, Microsoft announced the extension of Windows Analytics to Desktop Analytics, a new cloud-based service built into ConfigMgr and designed to create an inventory of applications running in the organization, assess the compatibility of applications with the latest feature updates for Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus, and create driver groups that represent the entire application and driver domain on a minimal set of devices.

The new Desktop Analytics service will provide you with information and information to help you make more informed decisions about the availability of updates for your Windows and Office customers. You can then optimize the pilot and production deployments with ConfigMgr. By combining your own company data with millions of devices connected to Microsoft cloud services, you can eliminate guesswork and focus on the major blockers.

Application compatibility

Microsoft also happily announced Desktop App Assure, a new Microsoft FastTrack service designed to address the compatibility issues of Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus applications. Microsoft assures that Windows 10 is the most compatible Windows operating system to date. Using millions of data points from customer diagnostic data and the Windows Insider validation process, 99 percent of applications are compatible with new Windows updates. You should therefore generally expect Windows 7-based applications to continue running on Windows 10 and later feature updates. But if you’re having application compatibility issues after updating Windows 10 or Office 365 ProPlus,

Simply escalate the compatibility problem to Microsoft by depositing a ticket via FastTrack and a Microsoft engineer will follow your work until the problem is resolved.

Desktop App Assure will be offered for free to Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education customers. Microsoft will share more details on this new service during its Ignite conference and will deploy a preview of this service in North America on October 1, 2018, with global availability expected before February 1, 2019.

Maintenance and support flexibility

Microsoft has announced the following four changes.

All currently supported feature updates for Windows 10 Enterprise and Education (versions 1607, 1703, 1709, and 1803) will be supported for 30 months from the date of initial release. . This will give customers on these releases more time for change management as they move to a faster update cycle.

All future feature updates for Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a September release (starting in 1809) will be supported for 30 months from the date of publication. This will give customers with longer deployment cycles the time they need to plan, test, and deploy.

All future feature updates for Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a targeted release for the month of March (starting in 1903) will continue to be supported for 18 months from the date of publication. This keeps the biannual rate of update.

All feature versions of Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Pro and Office 365 ProPlus will continue to be supported for 18 months (this applies to feature updates for the months of March and September).

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