Microsoft wants their customers to make Windows 10 and Office 365 their default modern desktop experience. First, the aggressive push to deploy Windows 10 to users running Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 and now a variety of tools and services have been introduced to help them upgrade to the latest offerings from Microsoft. Today, Microsoft announced two such cloud-based services that will make this transition much easier. This will help companies, as well as individuals, deploy their apps and services on this modern desktop before making the final migration and will eventually result in more stable app releases and compatibility on Windows 10 and Office.
Windows Desktop Analytics & Desktop App Assure
The new modern desktop support policies starting in September 2018 are:
This is what Microsoft announced in their announcement post-
- Desktop Analytics: A new cloud-based service integrated with ConfigMgr and designed to create an inventory of apps running in the organization, assess app compatibility with the latest feature updates of Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus, and create pilot groups that represent the entire application and driver estate across a minimal set of devices.
- Desktop App Assure: A new service from Microsoft FastTrack designed to address issues with Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus app compatibility. Windows 10 is the most compatible Windows operating system ever and using millions of data points from customer diagnostic data and the Windows Insider validation process, we’ve found that 99 percent of apps are compatible with new Windows updates. So you should generally expect that apps that work on Windows 7 will continue to work on Windows 10 and subsequent feature updates. But if you find any app compatibility issues after a Windows 10 or Office 365 ProPlus update, Desktop App Assure is designed to help you get a fix. Simply let us know by filing a ticket through FastTrack, and a Microsoft engineer will follow up to work with you until the issue is resolved.
This Desktop App Assure will be offered to customers running Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education for totally free of costs. It will be made available for the users in North America starting October 1st, 2018 and will be available worldwide starting February 1st, 2019. Microsoft will continue to support Office 2016 connections with the Office 365 services through October 2023.
If interested, you can read more about this announcement here.
