hello and welcome back to Microsoft Mechanics live coming up we're going to
take a look at in the end updates to device and app readiness for Windows 10
an office 365 ProPlus as you make your shift in the modern desktop we're going
to show you your options to offer real-world guidance for getting off of
older versions of Windows in office and all the updates coming to our telemetry
and analytics tools that are going to help you create deployment plans work
through device app and office add-in compat as well as deeper integration
with System Center Configuration Manager everyone's favorite tool and today I'm
joined by Amesh Mansukhani from the app and device readiness and office team
welcome thanks Jeremy it's always great to be here alright so I think most
people watching right now are starting to kick off their rollout of Windows 10
whether they're on an older version of Windows 10 or a newer one and going to
office 365 ProPlus now we've we've done a bunch of work in terms of building out
the tools and resources you can see here in our deployment process wheel all of
these things that were working on in your team specifically is working on the
concept of basically device and app readiness as well as some of the office
and LLB app delivery that's right that's just about any deployment right the
first step is to really is really about device and app readiness our team has
been leveraging the intelligence gathered from millions of pcs we've
upgraded to Windows 10 and office three spots and packaged the insights to help
you make data-driven data-driven decisions about targeting the right
devices for your deployments now customers are telling us that they're
seeing significant percentage of apps working in their new environment but
there's still some small percentage of apps drivers and even office add-ins
that could be an issue and our service is designed to really highlight them so
you can take action before it becomes a major operational issue all right this
sounds a lot like Windows Analytics is that an update to that well think of
this as an evolution to Windows analytics this is an
service which was built from the ground up takes the best of Windows analytics
enhances it with office data along with new workflows and machine learning
algorithms to ultimately help you reduce the overall workload when it comes to
ongoing - deployments we call this new service desktop analytics which will be
in preview soon all right let's see it what you're seeing here is the first
thing that we show you on the home screen of our new dashboard is security
updates as well as feature updates that cross windows and office right this is
building on the existing capabilities that we had with Windows analytics but
basically it's offering the office insights for add and compat in addition
to windows insights right that's right Jeremy we're bringing all this
information into a single console as you go down to the middle of the page you'll
see that not only there's a summary of your devices and apps we also add the
office apps and add-ins and then below here we start showing you a diversity of
your windows and office releases and versions but you're not taking away any
of the detail and the depth of information that we add in Windows
analytics right so I see a pretty high-level dashboard here do we still
get the same depth with this tool no even goes even further right with
machine learning that's able to better understand your environment to make
proactive recommendations where this really comes to life is within
deployment plans right that that actually give you information to help
you validate your entire environment right now a plumbing plan helps you
efficiently get from your current version or release of Windows in office
to the future released by providing you with the right set of workflows to be
able to get through that to be able to help you prepare pilot and ultimately
deploy your entire to your tyrant organization now the best part is that
we're deeply integrated with configuration manager so you can define
the devices that you want to target and build upon your deployment plan right so
how does it actually work then with config manager is there some kind of a
linkage whip we're not in or something they have to install well what we will
what we're doing today is we're leveraging the device collection
inventory information in configuration manager and publishing it with a newly
built micro service to send that information into desktop analytics cool
now as you can see here as I create a sample deployment plan I'm able to go in
and slow like the actual device collection said
it as my target and create my actual deployment from here got it then I can
as I go through future states I'm able to then go back into configuration
manager and have that information sent over and then be able to determine which
devices are actually ready to go and then be able to create things like a
phase deployment to be able to move those along very cool so it's a it's
actually recommending all the things that you have to do to kind of get the
right pilot group kind of start to create and kind of populate your
collections make sure you can deploy successfully but what's the next thing
you have to do well but what one thing I want to tell you is think of analytics
as the actual recipe to build your deployment plan and use configuration
manager to be the chef to actually make those deployments happen let me show you
how analytics can hope to reduce the overall workload through shared insights
and data-driven validation the first thing you'll do is you want to identify
your important assets within your organization in this screen you'll see a
list of noteworthy applications that are installed in greater than 2% of your
devices as you review them you will mark the ones that you want as critical as
you can see over here I can mark it as critical or important and then once
you're done with these steps we'll go to the next step of actually identifying
your actual pilot devices right and over here what we're gonna do is we're gonna
give you a recommendation based on the diversity of the devices make and models
and mark them either a critical or important from there so can we include
our excluded devices for example if my IT team maybe want to be part of the
pilot but let's say I value my job and don't want to start delivering
pre-release builds to my CEO or my CIO can I exclude abusers as well you know
we've gotten a lot of that feedback and in this scenario we give you the
flexibility to set a list of devices that should always be included and a
list of devices that should always be excluded and then we'll overlay our
algorithm we will then provide you the recommendation that ensures that you can
hit obtain a hundred percent coverage with a high number of redundancy this is
mainly to ensure that we have more than one device available in the event of
that device being offline for significant period of time makes sense
so what happens then after identify our set of pilot devices here we can see we
got a 100% coverage where we go next so from
there we go ahead and prepare our pilot devices for known issues so we give you
a curated list of all the Microsoft known issues where I can then go and
start looking at them remediate them and this an example we'll look at particular
driver and which will probably tell us that you know it's gonna have a problem
which we're gonna want to go ahead remediate for that that information gets
sent directly to configuration manager which then the admin can do the pre or
post action appropriately cool that's gonna help a lot of us then reduce the
time and run a validation time plus we're getting kind of data-driven
insights for all of this and you've shown some some known issues and you can
share them ahead of time in turn of in terms of your testing efforts so it's
not this manual process that we had to go through before that was kind of
painful frankly you might have had people running VMs to test the line of
business apps so it didn't affect their production work now all of this is kind
of data-driven what other help is there that we can provide well after we've
informed config man that these devices are ready to upgrade and the admin has
you know done all the remediation necessary we could start going and
looking at the deployment status here we give you in aggregate all the particular
issues that are occurring anything from like just full to other failure effects
and then telling you exactly which of the devices are affected okay so I I
can't tell you how many times I've been testing apps or waiting to hear whether
or not maybe a fix that I've built a transform file that I've put in between
the MSI and the actual OS is working this way hopefully the the I'd have to
wait for you to call me as to whether or not something's broken it's gonna
actually tell me that's proactively right that's right yeah so you're not
waiting for your helpdesk or operations team to actually surface that
information we give you right we give you this information directly in the
console itself right and how's this all work so beyond that what we're gonna be
able to do is then be be looking at all your actual devices and your assets and
start telling you how well or healthy they are based on the health status
right right cool or so or machine learning algorithm will then inform you
on which ones are meeting goals or actually a need attention and in this
case we see a number of devices that are currently meeting goals which we're
gonna want to go and sign off and then move forward into our overall deployment
which we're just gonna rinse and repeat that's how we're going to unblock these
devices and them all to our production users very
cool so it's kind of like at this point we've got all that we've got all the
data they're all marked ready for deployment in this case are we ready to
start doing production deployment or what's what's the next step definitely
all right there so what we can do is we can go back into our overall plan we'll
see a number of devices that are ready to deploy and start rinse and repeating
all those critical steps that we just talked about awesome so this is going to
help you then basically get all of kind of the David data-driven insights get
ready for the deployment stage it's really about making sure that
everything's ready that you're confident that you've got all the data to make
this decision because you don't want to throw something over the fence and then
wait for something in the break before you kind of start to reel that back
you've got some of these options with upgrade test sequences and things to
kind of roll back if you need to but it's way better if you've got this
proactive information here so config manager also has a lot of information as
well a lot of upgrades I would say and things that we've done on the networking
side if we follow the wheel as toucans a might say we can say let's look at
directory and network readiness and some of the optimizations that we've done
they're pretty significant first the things that a lot of people have been
asking for if you're configuration manager admin I think many people have
config manager right it's pretty much every hand will probably go up so one of
the cool things that we've done is we've added peer cache so we've got the peer
cache support we can do things like delivery optimization peer cache we've
had branch cache for a long time but basically that's taking all the traffic
moving it closer to the edge so that you're not basically you're not kind of
saturating your VPN lines and things to to manage your endpoints and doing it
through peer-to-peer work so something a lot of people have been asking for
that's part of this as well in terms of delivery and getting your network
prepared another thing you're gonna want to do as part of this is also getting
Azure ad implemented and one more thing so one more thing that I love about the
updates to config manager is the integration with LED bat part of Server
2016 now if you're not familiar with this if you think about throttling
normally take about 20% striper it's probably gonna be less but using bits or
something to be able to transfer large deployment files over the network either
between dps or from the DP to the endpoints now what you can do is
basically have background tasks use LED bat that's basically consuming all of
your network bandwidth if it sees that there's foreground traffic the users
trying to watch a video download an app do whatever it's
actually gonna yield all that traffic bandwidth for that foreground task so
the user doesn't feel it but instead of waiting a week to get a wim file down to
a machine you might be able to do it in a day or less depending at work is so
this is really cool stuff in terms of network optimization now one other thing
that I love about this is it's just one check box in order to get that running
as part of your distribution point general tab in those settings there if
you adjust the download speed to use unuse network bandwidth using LED bat
that's all you have to do to configure it and it's running it's off to the
races so really cool match we've seen a couple of things around readiness and
the network itself our infrastructure now we know our devices and our apps
already now the next phase is really to look at app delivery and kind of getting
to our office clients out there and I think a lot of people pray pretty
familiar with msi packaging and and the options that they have there but you're
also our expert resident expert on click to run and won't you tell us what's new
there well our office as we've recently announced click to run is the only
package type for all physio used for deployments and we have enhanced our
existing tools to ensure that we've made deployment easier let me show you how
right first we've updated the office customization tool to power the office
install wizard within configuration manager right this will enable our team
to deliver updates of installation settings sooner than wait for the next
version of office to be or the next release of actual configuration manager
as you can see here this workflow is fully integrated into configuration
manager where I could type in things like my organization I can then go in
and look at and pick a product that I want here I'll take the example Pro +
scroll that down a little bit make sure that we don't have groov installed and I
can start adding all this information directly into here and then pick a
language go ahead and I'll pick you know Dutch for example and click Next and all
of this information is done directly put within configuration manager where we
can just go into the standard workflow but we'd be remiss if we didn't talk
about the installation settings because there's some really cool stuff that
we've added there hi yeah all right let me kind of show you and I'm gonna use
the existing config dot office comm now again this is the same kind of set of
settings that we pay attention this euro config that
office comm if you want to start playing for this in building out your own can
pick that XML file effectively with all the different configurations you can do
this now it's open it's on the internet and it's part of configuration manager
as we saw before integrated this part of that GUI right so again from configure
man 1806 onwards any changes that we make on configured on office are come
automatically get sent over to configuration manager so you you have
all that information directly drop-down that installation settings oh let's go
with the installation settings so one thing I want to be able to show you here
actually it's gonna be right here oh there it is yeah
so we have two key things right here for those of you who are moving from click
to run 2013 version instead of uninstalling that and reinstalling the
latest Pro Plus we actually have a single click button right here that
allows you to do that we make that all that happen in the background
now the other thing that we've done if you're using scripts today to uninstall
and clean up any of your pesky reg keys and then finally install that we
actually built that into the setup files so no more off scrub a no we're off
scrub alright this is something a lot of people I think I've been asking for so
the nice thing is we get to actually change the MSI and to click to run and
do that without using some you know vbscript in the back right but wait
there's more ok right now the other thing I want to show you is we're now
introducing application settings these are the same set of settings that you've
had in traditional Oct for MSI right right where I can now go in pick up a
couple of settings and then be able to configure that directly here and have
that set up directly into my XML file after you have to package up like MST or
MSP files along with our office packages this is the XML right just the XML and
you could not only just do it at during install time you can do it post as well
very cold you have to setup before you had to setup your policy effectively to
do all of this stuff and now this granularity of configuration now it's
just part of Oct and you can do all that via preferences which is way more handy
and it's it's not as enforced I guess as a group policy but it's what a lot of
people tend to want to do anyway right but on that note of group policy we're
also introducing a new service that allows you to create new policies and
then be able to target these policies to different groups of users via the cloud
and no longer necessary GPO said you don't need the domain controller or any
of that structured not at all so if I log into a
this machine or your machine it will automatically recognize Who I am and
then download those policies and have them affected directly to me
wow that's excellent yeah that's that's the truth oh you guys can clap if you
all that's been an awesome thinking people been asking for I know I've had
the complaints the requests those things come in so this is great you know what
we've been going through yeah so now the other thing I want to also introduce to
you is our security policy advisor because this allows us to really
understand what is going on within your environment and to increase that overall
security posture so for example if I look at these word devices right here I
can see that there's a number of target users that are actually not using word
and I can quickly apply these settings directly to them and then they'll get
those policies based off that awesome awesome stuff so so many updates that
we've got across the board really when you think about if you go back to you
know our kind of thinking about the wheel both on the app and device riding
this side the networking side app delivery and all the policy management
that we can do there all these things that we've done to accelerate our
deployments for Pro Plus of course remember they have to be on the current
branch for config manager to take advantage of a lot of this stuff but you
can start playing with things like config at office comm any any closing
closing thoughts though mesh worship people could actually learn more well to
take advantage of the insides you and if you haven't done so already I want you
to start having the conversation with your respective teams about turning on
telemetry in your environment yeah and don't forget to start making that shift
get on to office News 5 Pro Plus get on Windows 10 to make that happen and so
you can learn more on the modern desktop deployment Center and by following us on
the series of desktop deployment essentials yeah desktop deployment
essentials is a brand new series that we have it's ten parts it follows every
step in the deployment process wheel that we have everything we go in-depth
with all the demos all the different all the different tools that you're going to
use across your deployment projects and in staying on same current after you get
to Windows 10 in office 365 ProPlus so stay tuned to that that's all the time
we have for today's show thank you for watching we'll see you next time