(digital tones)
- Welcome to Desktop Deployment Essentials,
our new series to help you prepare for your shift
to Windows 10 and Office 365 Pro Plus.
In the next few minutes, I'm gonna walk you through
the first step in our recommended deployment process wheel
by covering what you need to know
about application and hardware compatibility.
And along the way, I'm going to show you the tools
and options you have to discover your devices
and applications and prepare them
for deployment to Windows 10 and Office 365 Pro Plus.
Now if you've been in the industry for awhile,
the good news here is that preparing for the shift
is now much easier.
You might remember from your last major desktop deployment
the biggest hurdle to overcome was
application and hardware compatibility.
Now that, for the most part, goes away
with the majority of compatibility issues being resolved.
A few notable things made this possible:
technologies like file and registry virtualization
solved for DLL conflicts,
it's now common practice for applications
to not require elevation of privilege
and built-in compatibility modes and shimming
remove the problem of hard-coded version checks.
This means that just about any application
written in the past 10 years
will be compatible with Windows 10.
Now on the Office side, extensibility options
for COM add-ins and macros have remained
more or less static since Office 2010.
Even add-ins predating Office 2010 will typically work
without modification.
That said, depending on the size and age
of your organization, you'll still want to perform
some level of testing and validation
against hardware and software components
as part of your desktop deployment project.
Now this is really a four-step process,
starting inventory, then prioritization, testing,
and finally remediating app and hardware compatibility.
The generated inventory of managed PCs
along with apps running on those PCs,
you may currently be using things like
System Center Configuration Manager Inventory Reporting.
With Windows 10, we introduced a new intelligent solution
available with your Windows license
called Desktop Analytics.
This is our recommended tool,
and if you're not familiar with Desktop Analytics,
it's a cloud service that uses an agentless process
to inventory the computers, applications,
and Office add-ins across your desktop estate.
Now it works by tapping into compatibility information
for both application and drivers use this part
of Microsoft's upgrade cycles
for hundreds of millions of consumer PCs
and returns a detailed assessment
of driver and app compatibility issues.
Now these are issues that might block your upgrade,
and we give you links to suggested fixes
that are known to Microsoft.
And one more thing to note, once you've made the shift
to Windows 10 and Office 365 Pro Plus,
the tool helps you keep track of your deployment
of semi-annually feature updates so you can stay current.
So now with your inventory ready,
let's look at prioritizing the most common apps
and hardware used in your organization.
Perhaps the most time-saving roll of Desktop Analytics
serves is in helping you quickly see
what to focus on so that you can quickly unblock
as many PCs as possible for deployment.
Now let's move on testing.
In most cases, applications and drivers and add-ins
inventoried to work as is,
and for browser-based compatibility,
note that Microsoft Edge doesn't support Active X controls,
Browser Helper Objects, VBScript,
or other Legacy technologies.
And if you have websites or web apps
that still use this technology and need to run
in Internet Explorer, you can add them
to the Enterprise Modes Site List Manager,
so they run in IE.
Additionally, for your move to Office 365 Pro Plus,
you can use the Readiness Toolkit for Office
to test add-ins and VBA macros,
which can help you identify compatibility issues
with Office.
Now the final phase of device and app readiness
is to remediate.
Here you'll want to collect the required software
and driver packages, and you're gonna use those packages
to supersede or update older versions of those apps
and drivers as part of your deployment process.
So that covers our four-step process
and the setup for Desktop Analytics
to inventory and prioritize device and app readiness.
You can check our our guidance at the link shown.
Remember, as you work through your list,
you can continually phase your deployment
as more and more PCs become ready.
Now this means that you can work in parallel
in other steps on the deployment process wheel.
In fact, up next we're gonna explore
deployment-related considerations
for networking and directory services.
And to learn more visit our
Modern Desktop Deployment Center,
and keep following our
Desktop Deployment Essentials series,
here on Microsoft Mechanics.
Thanks for watching.