- Coming up I'm joined by Brad Anderson
to look at the latest updates
to support secure productivity experiences
across devices with Microsoft 365.
We're gonna look at new options
to get managed Windows sessions and apps
across devices using Windows Virtual Desktop,
streamline management experiences
for Microsoft 365 admins,
and what you can do to set baseline protections
and device configurations in Intune.
(techno music)
I'm joined once again by Brad Anderson,
CVP at Microsoft, welcome back.
- It's great to be here.
I love Mechanics.
- Thank you.
So always device experience and management,
it's a space that continues to evolve
and there are really more options than ever
to work from anywhere.
What are we doing to make it easier to support
and secure the best productivity experience on any device?
- It all starts with Microsoft 365
and that means it's really all about Windows 10,
Office 365 ProPlus, and then your management
and security coming from the cloud.
And to be really specific on that
I mean ConfigMgr current branch
or Intune is doing your management.
Now one of the characteristics about a modern device
is it has this great user experience
that also meets the needs
from a security compliance perspective from an IT.
Now one of the places I've spent a lot of my time
over the last several months is looking into
why we have these incredibly long boot time stories
that we here from users in commercial devices--
- Yeah, I see that all the time for a lot of people
that they've got multiple minute boot times.
- You know, the number of times I've heard
a customer or an IT leader say,
man, it takes me four or five minutes for my PC to boot,
and it's like well, why?
Why is that happening and how can we help IT understand
what they can do to make it a better experience?
Because the reality is
users are accustomed to immediate on.
My phone, I'm on, I'm working,
I want the same thing on my PC.
And so as I looked into this,
first and foremost, if you've just got poor hardware,
that's gonna cause a long boot time.
You know speed meaning you don't have enough RAM.
But if you've got good hardware,
what we have found is the next cause of slow boot times,
slow resume, and then why your battery drains so quick
is all the ages that get jammed onto a device
and those are predominantly management and security.
And so with Microsoft 365,
we have built this incredible solution
that we think fulfills your needs
from a security, management, and compliance perspective.
You can go with what we call Microsoft 365 native,
using all of our management security.
Secure the device, it meets the requirements
from a compliance and security perspective,
but delivers that amazing end-user experience.
So let me just give you a view of what it looks like.
This right here is my actual personal PC.
This is AAD joined, Intune enrolled.
And again, it meets Microsoft security policies,
which as you can imagine, our security policies
and requirements are high.
After all, we have an awful lot
of the world's data in our cloud.
- [Jeremy] Totally, totally.
- Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead
and I'm gonna power this on.
And what I want you to see here is
I'm gonna build a cold boot to productive in 20 seconds.
So you see here, it's coming up,
Windows hello comes online and authenticates me.
And right now, I could literally be bringing up
Outlook Word, be productive.
That's the experience we're talking about
when we say modern Windows or a modern device.
And this is what all of our users,
all of your users should expect and what they should get.
- Totally, so it's really an awesome example
really that brings to life the advantages
of getting modern with secure and intelligent management
for both end users and IT.
- That's right.
And for a user that needs access to the most advanced tools
so they can do their very best work
in the least amount of time across all of their devices.
Now, we've leveraging AI as a part of
the productivity experience so you can focus on
the content and less on the formatting
and you get these insights in your data,
or finding all the relative materials
to make your next doc or presentation stand out.
We're also using the cloud to get you back
to what you were working on
or on the files that we were shared with you
across your device is wherever you are.
It's all about making sure the user
is immediately productive.
For IT, this is all about providing that best experience
and keeping it up to date
while protecting your data and your users.
And here we use the cloud to help enable secure identity,
as well as access management with things like
multi-factor authentication and conditional access.
We can even apply conditional management experiences
based upon device or apps accessing specific content.
So we're gonna apply tighter controls to devices
accessing sensitive information
or looser controls to those accessing low-risk data.
And we can use the power of the cloud
to scan your information to help you understand
what you're gonna wanna protect,
whether that's at rest or in transit.
We can detect anomalous behaviors
and even proactively hunt the bad actors out
who may have infiltrated your environment.
- That's right.
So let's switch gears though to Windows Virtual Desktop
because we're bringing all these really powerful
experiences on mobile devices that are native,
also on personal devices and across the browser,
but where does WVD then fit in here?
- Well first of all, we are really excited about
Windows Virtual Desktop and the interest in the preview
has just been off the charts.
So Windows Virtual Desktop is the modern Windows experience
running in the Microsoft cloud.
And there are so many reasons to use
remote desktops and applications.
And what we're doing here is we are really
breaking down many of the barriers,
both in terms of the experience and the management
just to make it easier.
Whether you wanna ensure separation of data
from the device, whether you need high bandwidth,
low latency connections to data sources,
ensure that compute resources are powerful enough
in scenarios like engineering, software development,
or media production just to name a few,
we have literally been making changes
inside of the Microsoft 365 product to ensure
that that combination of Windows 10,
Office 365 running with Windows Virtual Desktop
and management secured by ConfigMgr and Intune
delivers the absolute best experience for users.
- That makes a lot of sense,
let's see this in action.
- Yeah, let's do it.
First, let's walk through the end user experience.
We can use any device, iOS, Android, Mac, or Windows,
even just a browser.
So Jeremy, why don't you walk through
the end user experience and then I'll show how you set it up
and how you configure it.
- Alright, sounds good.
So in my case, I've actually got a Windows 10 device here.
And you can see when I get to my start menu,
I can actually see the different apps
that have been provisioned for me by IT
and they're right there next to all the apps
that they've provisioned to me from Configuration Manager,
I'm just gonna open Excel for example.
And the only thing that's really different here
is in the task bar, you can see a glyph
that says it's from Windows Virtual Desktop.
When I click on a file, it's nice and responsive.
I can even do things like snap the app
to one side of the screen, alongside a native app
so it even feels native from an end user perspective.
So a really seamless experience there.
Another great thing here is so if I go to another desktop
I can go to full desktop view as well.
So I'm gonna go ahead and click on
the multi-session environment.
And here, one of the great things is if I open
the entire Windows desktop, in this case for Windows 10,
I can do something brand new,
which is launch and run Outlook.
And one of the things I really love about this is
when I fire up Outlook and I'm using it, immediately, I
didn't have to spend any time in terms of hydrating my inbox
but how did all that work?
- You know, the file storage and management enhancements
are part of the work that we've done
with the FSLogix acquisition.
FSLogix allows you to have that immediate startup experience
in OneDrive for business and in Outlook
as if it was all on a local drive.
So users can jump straight into Outlook or OneDrive
without waiting for anything
to have to hydrate in the cache,
it's just immediate.
I've known the FSLogix founder, Randy, for almost 30 years.
In fact, we sat across from each other in cubicles
when we first started taking phone calls
in technical support.
What FSLogix does is it really accelerates
and improves that end user experience in a virtual scenario.
If you've worked with VDI in the past
where Outlook and OneDrive cache takes time
to hydrate and get it moved over, FSLogix solves that.
And when the VDI session is provisioned,
your cache for Outlook and OneDrive for business
is immediately hydrated.
You're just off and running, it's amazing.
- So we saw the seamless end user experience
but the thing I'm most excited about
is actually the IT experience.
So what does it take to get this setup?
- Now as seamless as the user experience was,
if you've ever set up remote desktop services,
you'll know that the IT experience
could use some improvement.
So let's show you how we've made it better.
So right here, I'm inside of the Azure marketplace
and we have a resource manager template
that you can actually start to use to configure.
Now, these will be used to spin up a virtual machine
in the next step and create your
Windows Virtual Desktop tenant.
I'll go ahead and click create here.
I'll select my usage profile
and I can say hey, is this low, medium,
or a high user kind of configuration.
And it'll automatically size the VMs for your needs.
Now here's where things really get exciting.
Before, you needed to use a server OS
for multi-session environments
and the client OS was limited to one connected user.
It's important to understand that Windows Virtual Desktop
is the only license that allows you to run
a full Windows 10 desktop in a shared public cloud.
In the gallery here, I can choose Windows 10 enterprise
with multi-session support.
And here I just add a few tenant authentication fields
and now we can start the build by clicking create.
Now check this out, it's gonna take seven minutes
and 39 seconds to fully build out
this VDI environment that we just created.
If you've ever built out a VDI
or remote desktop services solution in your own data center,
you know that this could have taken weeks.
Now you have the power of the cloud,
unlimited capacity, a simple solution.
You can now provision this literally in a couple of minutes.
- And it's really awesome to see all the progress
that the team's made even since
we announced it a few months back.
And one of the other interesting benefits
you get with Windows Virtual Desktop
is that you can run Windows 7 desktops
in the cloud for up to three years
without having to pay for extended security updates
past the January 14, 2020 date.
Now this is also gonna be really helpful
if you've got maybe applications
with compatibility issues with Windows 10.
And speaking of that, I know that we're doing a lot
to automate that application validation and testing.
What are we doing now in terms of people
that are moving to newer versions of Office and Windows?
- Back at Ignite, we announced a new service
that we call the Desktop App Assure.
This has been one of the most incredible things
I think I've worked on in my career
'cause what this is is, we're saying,
we have such high confidence in the rate of compatibility
of Windows 10 that we're gonna give you a phone number
and if you have any application
that you think has got a compatibility issue,
you actually call my engineering team.
We will look at the app, if it's a Windows issue,
we're gonna fix Windows.
If it's an issue with your app, we'll help you fix your app.
But this has enabled us to basically put a net below IT
that says hey, you can upgrade
to Windows 10 with confidence,
with the security that Microsoft is standing and backing you
and if there are any compatibility issues,
we're gonna fix them.
- One of the great things is
actually the data we've collected
since we've started running the program.
So really a lot of things are very compatible
and we've got a lot of data to prove that.
- And you know what, the numbers surprised
all of us to be honest.
What we have seen is with all of the applications
that have been brought to us to look at,
we are seeing that Windows 10
has a greater than 99.9% compatibility rate
with applications coming out from Windows 7.
That's unbelievable.
So what this means is 1/10 of 1% of apps
that we have looked at,
1/10 of 1% actually have a compatibility issue
with Windows 10.
That is nothing short of remarkable.
- It is totally amazing.
Right, so beyond device management
and deployment side of things,
what are we doing then to deploy
the admin experiences and tooling for Microsoft 365?
- So what we've focused on is there used to be
23 different entry points and we've consolidated those
into one entry point now for Microsoft 365,
for all of types of administrators.
We've set a specialist workspace that allow you
to dive deep into those granular settings
if you're one of those specialists.
So Jeremy, I know you have all of this up and running,
why don't you give us a view.
- Great, so this is something that's coming out of preview.
We've had this in preview for a few months now
but one of the great things that I can do here,
this is really the heart of the admin experience
from admin.microsoft.com
and it's really your starting point,
whatever your role is.
Now here I can see that I've got some pinned information
here on my dashboard, all the relevant tasks to me
on the left hand navigation.
I can click down into any of the granular tasks
that I might wanna do in terms of managing users
or devices for example.
And it's really optimized for all the tasks that I do most
because it's been personalized.
Now, here I can also see if I want to
and I wanna go into special spaces like Teams
or SharePoint or Exchange or Azure AD, they're all there.
But I wanna really show your attention to front and center,
Protecting sensitive info.
These are recommendations that are made for me,
tailored specific to my environment.
So when I go here and view the recommendation
and I can see it's found actually debit and credit cards,
passport numbers, things that I should be protecting.
It actually let's me create a policy
that will actually flag me of these and protect any files
that contain the sensitive information.
Now back in this view, I can see that my users are protected
and I can also stay up-to-date with Office 365 software
and see what the licensing state is here
and all the mobile app policies that I have out in place.
Now one thing I wanna show you that's really cool
is in terms of user management.
If I go and expand the users navigation item here
and go into active users, one of the great things here
is we've actually taken all the different user controls
that were spread everywhere and now if I click into Abbi,
I see that I can do basic account stuff.
I can obviously change her password if I need to do that,
also change any of the information around Abbi
but then even see things like all the licensing states
for the applications.
Everything's here.
If I wanna change from Office 365 E5 to something else,
I can do that right here just in one click.
And even mail settings,
like even down into the specific workloads,
all of that's in one view.
So if Abbi calls me,
I've really got just kind of a one stop shop
to do all of that.
For everybody watching, the brand new admin center
starts rolling out today.
Now two things, if you already have the preview running,
you don't have to do anything.
Now this is gonna be the default experience
and if you wanna get the experience sooner
before maybe it takes place in your tenant,
you can actually login to Admin.microsoft.com,
turn on the preview,
and you'll have this experience right now.
- Now talking about bringing it all together
and doing some of the things,
let's talk a little about some of the things
we've done in security.
Security's a big focus in what we're doing on Microsoft 365
and I'm really excited about one of the things
that we're just releasing right now.
I wanna talk to you a little bit about security baselines.
Historically, we've worked with governments around the globe
and this work helps us to define
what a trusted, secure device is.
A Windows device with Office running in it.
And you know, many, many of the governments around the globe
take this set of policies
and that's what they've implemented.
- And these are pretty powerful.
These are hundreds of settings literally
that you can do through Intune
and the great thing is the devices don't always have to be
domain joined kind of in the past like we might have had
with group policy in Active Directory.
- Yeah so this is really I think one of these things
that organizations are gonna love
because rather than have to figure out what a secure PC is,
you can just leverage the work
that Microsoft has done with governments.
So let me just kind of show you the security baselines here.
So first, what you're looking at here is the entry point
into the security baselines.
And the first thing I'm gonna do is
just kinda click into this.
And the first thing that you'll see here
is I have to give it a name.
So I give it a name, I give it a little information,
and then I go ahead and I can take a look
at all of the different settings.
So here's just a few of them.
I can do things like I can set the lock screen,
block video stream capturing and auto-play of video.
You can see all the BitLocker and browser controls.
And there's more controls around conductivity,
data protection, virtualization-based security,
protect your credentials with device guard.
I'll stop right there but I could keep going
because there are literally hundreds of pre-built settings
to get you started and the nice thing is
because they're all cloud enforced,
devices don't have to be domain joined, as you said,
you can just get these policies applied
to all of your devices immediately.
So we're constantly doing these kind of things
inside of Microsoft 365 and helping you understand
how you can increase your controls,
deliver power and intelligence from the cloud,
to just make it simple for you to modernize
the way in which you protect your end points.
- These are really big updates and it really shows
how we're making it easier to connect
to manage experiences, stay up-to-date,
and really save time managing Microsoft 365 services.
If I'm watching this from home,
where do I get started?
- Well the first thing, I would go sign up
for the Windows Virtual Desktop.
Also, if you're a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 administrator,
go enable the new look and feel
and start using that integrated console.
And if you're still on Windows 7
and an older version of Office,
go check out the Modern Desktop Deployment Center
and follow that deployment wheel
but get upgraded.
- Right and you can find that at aka.ms/HowtoShift.
Really great recommendations,
thanks for joining us today, Brad.
And of course, keep watching Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest updates and don't forget to hit subscribe
and follow us on Twitter.
Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.
(techno music)