A calendar approach for keeping the modern workplace up to date

by Scott Muniz | Jun 18, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

As organizations everywhere juggle the challenges of business continuity, remote work, and keeping devices up to date, we want to reinforce the plan, prepare, and deploy approach for Windows servicing with tactical guidance that you can use when you are ready to consider rolling out the next Windows 10 feature across your organization.

In recent blog posts, we’ve discussed how to optimize Windows monthly update deployment for remote devices and how to deploy a new version of Windows 10 in a remote world. These posts provide prescriptive guidance to help enterprises take updates regularly using our recommended data-driven servicing approach with tools such as Windows Update for Business. Today, we want to introduce a calendar-based approach to help you stay current with Windows 10 by implementing an ongoing process, inspired by modern cloud-based tooling, that enables a fluid cadence for updating devices across remote and on-premises environments.

This new calendar approach creates a single view of Windows, Office, and Configuration Manager release cycles to help reduce the complexity of updating an operating system (OS) for any business, regardless of size, and provides flexibility for using multiple calendars across various user scenarios. Calendar timelines can be shortened or expanded to meet the needs of your organization. For example, if you take Windows 10 feature updates as they are released, your calendar might look something like this:

Figure 1. Windows 10 rapid deployment calendar

To support your adoption of this calendar approach, we are working to consolidate and update our prescriptive guidance on Docs and have created some targeted resources to help you plan, prepare, and deploy, including:

• Stay current with Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 Apps, a new learning path on Microsoft Learn that contains three modules of prescriptive guidance to walk you through the plan, prepare, and deploy phases.
• Update Baseline for Windows 10, a set of Microsoft-recommended policy configurations for Windows 10 that help you optimize deployment and device management plus a comprehensive guide containing real-world best practices and important considerations.

To get started on shifting from project-based to a process-based servicing approach, read my more detailed post on how to Transform Windows feature updates with a servicing calendar. I also invite you to bookmark the Windows 10 servicing discussion board on Tech Community as this is where we’ll be posting deeper looks at how to use the calendar and hosting events, such as office hours, to answer your questions. We hope these new investments will assist your organization in staying current, and we look forward to hearing how you are using these resources to support you when updating Windows. Please share your thoughts below!

Microsoft 365 self-guided wizards: Curated assets to meet customer needs

by Scott Muniz | Jun 18, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Microsoft is continuously looking for ways to make things easier and more efficient for our customers.

We’re happy to introduce our new Microsoft 365 self-guided wizard for business and enterprise customers, based on scenario and product selections for deployment, migration, adoption, learning, and security. The self-guided wizards also include a new remote work and learning path, in response to COVID-19, for business use, plus education and government entities.  We’ve collected our best resources, based on your unique and specific needs.  Look for regular monthly updates to our wizards, including additional scenario and user coverage.

You can select whether you are looking for resources for Microsoft 365 for Business (small and medium business plans) or for Enterprise, along with the new COVID-19 path to address a variety of remote work and learning scenarios.

Based on your selection, the wizard will guide you through a set of simple questions to help you identify the top resources for guidance and implementation.

Let’s start by looking at scenarios. Currently, we have five scenarios available within the Microsoft 365 Business and Microsoft 365 Enterprise selections. Let’s look at the security scenario:

Now, select which security scenario you need help with:

Based on your selection, the tool will walk you through several more questions to help identify the best resources to address your needs.

Let’s jump to the end of the wizard, where you are given recommendations based on your specific selections:

Remember, we will continue to grow and curate this wizard with our latest offers, resources, and customer-identified needs. We hope that this helps to connect you with the right resources to give you a head start on your Microsoft 365 journey.

For customers seeking guidance in addition to the self-serve resources, FastTrack for Microsoft 365 offers remote deployment assistance at no additional cost, for customers with 150+ licenses of eligible plans.

We’d love to get your feedback, so please comment and let us know what other wizards would be helpful to your organization. Thank you.