- Coming up, we'll dive into what's new and what's coming
in Windows 365 for admins
including the new Windows 365 desktop app
to access Cloud PCs, more comprehensive IT management,
and new integration with Citrix HDX Plus for Windows 365.
And walk us through everything,
I'm joined once again by Scott Manchester
who leads the Windows 365 engineering team.
Welcome back.
- Thanks Jeremy. It's great to be back.
We've got a lot of exciting things to share today.
- I'm glad that you're back on.
So this time we actually wanted to dedicate our show
to more IT and management focuses
really given the momentum that we're seeing with Windows 365
just one year in.
- Yeah, this is really a great time
to go deeper into the updates here.
Pretty much every industry has started deploying Cloud PCs.
These are organizations that may have shied away
from desktop virtualization
in the past due to its complexities.
And now with Windows 365 delivering Cloud PCs to your users,
all that complexity goes away.
- And that's really the point, isn't it?
You know, these are just like any other PCs
that you provision only they're in the cloud,
which makes it a lot easier.
And also it's a rich experience for users.
And last time, you were on,
we actually showed a few first looks
for end user capabilities that are in the works.
So first, how you'll soon be able to move easily
between your Cloud PC in a local PC with Windows 365 Switch
and even a future option for using your Cloud PC
completely disconnected from the internet
with Windows 365 Offline.
Now at the time you also showed
some updates around the Windows 365 app
that can be deployed for users
to help them with discoverability
and also access to their Cloud PC.
So what's new there?
- I've got great news, Jeremy.
The new Windows 365 app is available now in preview,
and you can find it in the Microsoft Store.
It lets you access your Cloud PCs using Windows 11
and soon we'll add support for Windows 10 as well.
And in a future update,
it will be available as an inbox app in Windows 11.
Let me show you how this changes things
from an access perspective.
It really starts with connecting to your Cloud PC
and we've made it as simple
as logging into your Microsoft 365 account.
So you don't need to worry about
finding a workspace URL or other parameters.
So now it'll walk me through the first run experience
so I can see all of my options to easily get this set up
with available controls and integration with Windows 11.
And you'll notice this is a consistent experience
with the web client.
From here, I can see my Cloud PCs
along with their specifications.
Now before I connect, I'll walk you through
the additional controls to manage my Cloud PC.
Previously these were available in the web client
and now I can do everything from the app.
You can see I can restart it.
I can also reset it back to its original configuration
or restore to a previously known good state.
And point in time if I get my Cloud PC into a bad state.
I can even rename it,
and I can troubleshoot it right from here.
So let me start that right now.
- And I can imagine this troubleshooting
is really useful for cases like,
you know, network configurations or firewall settings,
maybe if you're on public wifi or connecting from home.
- Yeah, and that's one of the most common
and most difficult things to troubleshoot today.
So the troubleshooter has finished
and you can see everything looks healthy.
Now if I did encounter an issue,
it would give me more information
before I can call the help desk.
So now if I go ahead and connect to my Cloud PC
that will resume my session,
and you'll see it's exactly how I left it.
- And both of your apps are open and ready to go
in this case.
But there were some capabilities that you mentioned
were different compared to the web client
when you got the desktop app.
- That's right. The Windows 365 app has deep integration
with your local Windows device,
and you can do quite a bit more compared
to accessing your Cloud PC from the browser.
And one of my favorite capabilities
is the additional USB peripheral support
like connecting to a built-in or attached local webcam.
Now as I start a Teams meeting using meet now,
I'll go ahead and enable my camera.
Then if I open Device settings,
you'll see that I have both onboard cameras
available for my Surface
as well as the two studio cameras attached
via USB capture cards.
And this goes hand-in-hand
with the optimizations we've made for Windows 365
for Teams using multimedia redirect,
which acts like a direct connection
to your local webcam feed.
So you're not compromising video quality,
or adding unnecessary latency.
- Right, and by the way,
also you can with the Windows 365 app,
connect up to 16 monitors.
But going back to our Cloud PC management controls,
you know, like reset and restore that we just saw,
if you're a Windows 365 device admin,
can I control what a user sees then, from the desktop app?
- Absolutely.
As an admin you have full control over the experience.
And just like the rest of Windows 365 configuration
as you see here,
everything is managed
right from the Microsoft Intune portal.
For user settings,
you'll be able to control the ability for Cloud PC users
to be configured as local admins,
enable self-service resize or reset,
and options to configure point-in-time restore.
Now, restore points
are one of many BCDR capabilities in the service
and Cloud PCs are backed up using incremental snapshots.
Then if you restore a Cloud PC,
it will return to a known good state.
And this is useful
if you accidentally delete something in the Cloud PC
or were impacted by ransomware.
And we've built the controls into the Windows 365 experience
to perform a restore from the admin center.
So here I'm looking at Ana Bowman's Cloud PC
in the device view.
I'll open Restore,
you'll normally see up to 14 restore points available.
And if I wanted to restore her Cloud PC back
to let's say September 28th,
I just need to select this and then confirm the restore.
And this process just takes a moment
and our Cloud PC will be restored right back
to that original state
- And that's really a ton of control.
So are there other experiences that we've updated
in the Intune portal?
- Absolutely. So everything you need to do
to set up and run this service
is right here in the Intune portal.
We also give you end-to-end visibility
into performance and alerts,
connection quality, utilization and more.
Let's start here and look at performance.
So we've built new controls in the device overview.
I'm in the Cloud PC performance tab,
and I can see Cloud PCs
with connection quality issues and low utilization.
Looks like we have nine Cloud PCs
that have slow round trip times.
So I'll dig into the report and I can see
the time taken to sign in for these devices.
Now even though this one from Ana Bowman
has a relatively high bandwidth connection,
the round trip time is too high
and should be way less than that.
So I'll click into her device to get more details.
You'll see connectivity status is unavailable,
so I'll dig a little deeper.
And it looks like her device has a policy configured
that prevents remote access.
So now I'll run the troubleshooter now.
And here you can see it fixes the issue.
Now you can see this status is now available and healthy.
And to help discover other types of issues,
we've added Windows 365 alerts,
so I can quickly find out issues or failures
affecting the service even before a user files a ticket.
From the Tenant administration blade, I'll go into Alerts.
And here I can see there are four alerts for Windows 365.
I'll open this one from
Azure network connection failure blocking access,
and I get a summary with full details for this alert.
In fact, it might be the same issue we just fixed
because in next steps, it also recommends
we fix the AD credentials or policies preventing access.
- And connectivity obviously is a priority in this case.
So it's really great that we've got visibility, diagnostics,
and also troubleshooting built-in.
But why don't we go back to another important topic,
utilization.
So what can we do there?
- Sure. These are all things
that are key to managing the service.
To manage utilization,
you can also right-size your Cloud PCs.
This helps deliver the right level of performance
and keeps things cost efficient.
Let me start by showing you how to identify
underutilized Cloud PCs.
So I'm back in the devices overview
and your new Cloud PC performance tab.
This time I'll click into the report
for Cloud PCs with low utilization.
And you can see that we have five Cloud PCs
that haven't connected in a few weeks.
There's also the total time connected in days
since each Cloud PC was last accessed.
The good news is I can take action
and redeploy or downsize these devices.
In fact, I'll open up Mario's Cloud PC with low utilization,
and you can see this is
a powerful eight core 32 gig RAM machine.
So to optimize cost while Mario is out, I can resize it.
And there are two options with either two or four cores.
I'll choose this one for now and can always upsize it later.
So I'll hit resize and then confirm.
Importantly this one affect Mario's files, apps,
or other configurations.
And the operation just takes a couple of minutes
to shut down, resize, and restart.
- Okay, so now you can easily both upsize and downsize
your existing Cloud PCs really to match demand.
But I'd like to switch gears though,
because I bet a lot of people who are watching
have Citrix environments that they're working with now.
So why don't we highlight what's possible there?
- Citrix has always been a great partner,
and we've done a ton of work to integrate them
deeply into the Windows 365 experience.
We've built a lot of the Citrix management experience
directly into Intune.
In fact, Jeremy, I know you have previous experience
in managing Citrix environments.
Why don't you walk us through this?
- Right, I do and I'm happy to.
So my history is with bare metal deployment,
so this was a lot easier in comparison.
So you'll start by connecting up the two services.
Now here in Intune under Tenant administration
and Connectors and tokens, there is a Citrix connector.
And after I can figure the connection
on the Citrix Cloud console side,
here in Intune, it's just this one toggle to enable it.
So now both environments are wired up.
And that also helps on the Citrix Cloud console side too.
In fact, here from the Citrix Cloud console,
I can find any of the Cloud PC users
for my Windows 365 environment
in order to give them Citrix licenses that they'll need.
So here I'm going to go ahead and add a user.
And I'll search for Matt.
There he is, he's on our team.
I'll go ahead and select him and click OK.
Then I'll click save to confirm.
Now my favorite thing though
about connecting the Citrix service to Intune
is that it's going to be really easy
to configure all of your policies in one place
and find the right ones really quickly.
So I'm in the configuration profile settings
from Citrix HDX for user configs.
And if you've ever configured Citrix policies before,
you'll recognize that most of these familiar settings
are just right here.
You don't need to add more ADMX templates
or dig for hard to find settings
in the standard ADMX-backed Windows policy templates.
It's just all right here
and it just feels like home if you're a Citrix admin.
So I'll go ahead and search for the clipboard
and you'll see this one here
in terms of clipboard redirection.
I'll go ahead and disable that
and I can do all of that right from within Intune.
And there's also really nice integration
on the user experience side too.
So I can access all of my Windows 365 Cloud PCs
right here from the Citrix workspace.
And by the way, this works using the apps or the web client.
And I can connect,
just like I would any other Citrix desktop.
And you'll see that once it connects
there are the Citrix HDX controls.
They're also integrated and working with my Cloud PC.
And Scott, I know that your team's also been working on
additional scenarios to make Cloud PCs
more accessible to other use cases.
- That's right.
We want to make Windows 365 available to everyone.
And we're expanding the Windows 365
to more organizations in use cases.
Windows 365 is now generally available
for Government Community Cloud
and Government Community Cloud High organizations in the US.
And coming soon, you'll be able to provision Cloud PCs
for shift or part-time employees
who only need Cloud PCs during their workday
for a limited time or to save costs.
- And these additions are really going to open up
a lot of new options.
But to run things out
for organizations currently using
Windows 365 Business Edition,
what's new there?
- Well, we're going to make it even easier
for you to access and manage your Cloud PCs.
First, we're introducing sign-in integration
with Microsoft Accounts
like Outlook.com email addresses for example,
as a way to securely access your Cloud PC.
And as you invite others, you just need to add their name
and Microsoft Account address.
So you don't have to use a work or school account
to access your Cloud PC.
Now that said, if you are using Intune with Azure AD
to manage your devices,
we've built a new option
to automatically onboard your Cloud PCs,
and it's super simple to set up.
Right from the business portal,
you just need to navigate to your organizational settings.
And there's a new option to enroll your Cloud PCs
in Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
And you can enable this with just one click.
And that's it.
So now your Cloud PCs moving forward
will enroll into management
and all of your required policies and apps will be applied.
- That's probably one of the easiest enrollment options
I've seen for Intune.
So for anyone who's watching right now
looking to get started with the Windows 365,
what do you recommend?
- There are a few things you can do now.
First, if you haven't started trying out Windows 365,
now's the perfect time to jump in.
You can sign up for a trial now
and find all the information you need
to build Cloud PCs at windows365.com.
And once you have Windows 365 running
you can try out the new app at aka.ms/Windows365app.
- Awesome stuff. Thanks for joining us today
and sharing all the Windows 365 updates.
And keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics
to stay up to date.
And be sure to subscribe to our channel
if you haven't already.
And as always, thank you for watching.