LIVE WEBCAST: Windows 10 - How to achieve digital transformation through affordable innovation

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Windows 10: How to achieve digital transformation through affordable innovation

LIVE WEBCAST:
June 7, 2016 10:00-10:45AM PST (GMT-8)

Digital transformation is the process of using today’s technology to modernize outdated processes and meet the most pressing needs of your business.
Thanks to recent advances in lower cost tablet technology and Microsoft’s suite of cloud and productivity services, complete digital transformation is more accessible now than ever before. A new class of affordable devices is revolutionizing the way businesses and their employees work and interact with customers.
Sign up now to:

Sign up here >>

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

The Hidden Microsoft Edge Features You Didn’t Know About

The Hidden Microsoft Edge Features You Didn’t Know About

It’s hard to switch browsers when we’re comfortable with what we’re used to. But knowledge is power and it’s healthy to know your browser options.

Microsoft Edge is the new browser available in Windows 10. Here is a video that provides an overview of features you may not know about!
And in case you’re interested in other Edge details, here’s research that shows how Edge is faster than Chrome, how it’s incredibly secure, and how Cortana can help you with your web browsing experience.

 

Watch the video here>>

How students around the world are being empowered to achieve more

how students are being empowered - managed solution

How students around the world are being empowered to achieve more

By Suzanne Choney as written on blogs.microsoft.com
Microsoft is committed to “building immersive and inclusive learning experiences for students and teachers around the world, experiences that build 21st-century skills including communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity and computational thinking,” writes Tony Prophet, corporate vice president of Education Marketing.
In the classroom, OneNote, Skype, Sway and Minecraft empower teachers and students to create and share in entirely new ways, teach and learn through doing and exploring, accommodate any learning style, and focus the classroom experience on learning outcomes, Prophet says.
Yusuf Medhi, Microsoft corporate vice president of Windows and Devices Marketing, writes that with new Windows 10 devices that are “tailor made for education and perfect for students, we are seeing strong demand for Windows 10 in the classroom,” including Windows 10 devices that start at $199.

New Innovations for the Classroom with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

New Innovations for the Classroom with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update

By Terry Myerson as written on blogs.windows.com
At Build, we announced the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Today, I’m excited to share additional features for educators and students, alongside other education news today from Microsoft. Today, Windows is the leading global platform for K-12 education. Our enduring goal is for Windows to be the best place to learn and the best platform for teaching.

In today’s modern classroom, our teachers face unique technology challenges:
At the same time, students have so much to gain from the latest technology tools, increasingly not only as a great way to learn, but also as a requirement for many jobs.

All New Tools for Educators with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update delivers new innovations for the modern classroom, including:

new innovations for education - managed solution

new innovations for education 2 - managed solution

new innovations for education 3 - managed solution

New Technology Helps Students Learn and Educators Teach

These features build on other new innovations which will become available in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update this summer. In the modern classroom, students should be able to write notes on their device as they would on paper, ask questions of their personal digital assistant and trust their security is protected. Windows 10 is designed with security in mind, with features like Windows Defender, Device Guard and Windows Hello. And the Windows 10 Anniversary Update delivers new innovations to help kids learn, including:

new innovations for education 4 - managed solution

Other new technology will integrate with Windows 10, offering even more opportunities for the classroom:
Integration with Microsoft Classroom and OneNote: Students can work on assignments with other classmates, including editing each other’s work in real-time and using Windows Ink within OneNote. The Office team shares more details here.
Minecraft: Education Edition for Windows 10: In June, we will be launching an early access program for Minecraft: Education Edition so any educator can download and try it for free on Windows 10. You can read more from the Minecraft team here.
From South Africa to Australia to Puerto Rico to the US, schools are already embracing Windows 10. With the new enhancements coming in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, we look forward to making it even easier for classrooms to become more productive with Windows 10.
Schools and families can take advantage of the free upgrade offer to Windows 10 for the next few months, or choose from the broad range of Windows 10 devices available for every budget, starting at $199. Devices like the Acer TravelMate B117, ASUS Transformer Book Flip TP200, Dell Latitude 11 Education Series, Dell Inspiron 3000, HP Stream 11 PRO Notebook PC, Lenovo N22, or Surface Pro 4 offer great Windows 10 experiences, perfect for learning.
* For Windows 10 machines in the Shared Cart configuration, running on affordable hardware
**Cortana available in select markets

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Sign up to receive our industry newsletter:


[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Use OneDrive to fetch files not saved in your OneDrive folder

 

onedrive-managed-solution

You're no longer tied to the OneDrive folder -- you can grab files from any folder on your PC.

As Written by: Sarah Jacobsson Purewal on: cnet.com
Face it -- cloud storage services have made our lives way more convenient. There's nothing quite like being able to save a file in a folder and then instantly have access to that file from a completely different computer.
But what if you forget to save an important file in your cloud storage folder?
Well, if you're a OneDrive user, you can now use OneDrive to "fetch" files that aren't saved in your OneDrive folder -- all you have to do is make sure the computer you want to grab a file from is turned on and connected to the Internet.
This feature works in Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10, but is not supported in Windows 8.1 -- Windows 8.1 computers will be able to fetch files from other computers, but other computers will not be able to fetch files from a Windows 8.1 computer.

Set up fetching

Before you can use the fetch feature, you'll need to set it up. To do this, you will need to have OneDrive installed on your PC.
1. Right-click the OneDrive icon in your system tray and click Settings
2. A window will pop up. Under the Settings tab, check the box next to Let me use OneDrive to fetch any of my files on this PC.
3. Click OK.

Fetch files

Once you've set up fetching on a computer, you can access all of the files on that computer -- whether they're saved in your OneDrive folder or not -- from your OneDrive account. Here's how to do that:
1. Make sure the PC you want to access is turned on and connected to the Internet.
2. Open up a Web browser and log in to OneDrive. You can only access files from a Web browser -- not from the desktop application.
3. In your OneDrive account, you should see a section on the left side labeled PCs. Here, you will see all of the PCs that are associated with your OneDrive account. Click the name of the PC you want to access.
4. If this is the first time you're accessing this PC, you'll see a security check. In order to prove you have access to this PC, you must sign in with a security code. Click Sign in with a security code to receive a security code via text message or email. Once you get your code, enter it and click Submit.
5. You will now see all of the files on the connected PC -- not just the files in your OneDrive.

Microsoft Releases Windows 10 1511 Enterprise Build

windows10 release

Following on the past weeks November Update to Windows 10 and Xbox being updated to Windows 10, Microsoft has released the ISO of the Enterprise Edition of Windows 10 1511. This does fall in line with Microsoft’s insistence that Windows 10 is now ready for the Enterprise with version 1511.
Within this version corporate users will be able to try out all of the new features designed for business in Windows 10 including Windows Update for Business, Windows Store for Business, and Azure Active Directory Join. In addition there are security upgrades including the ability to turn off the collection of telemetry data.
These are much requested features by businesses before they begin to look at rolling Windows 10 out across their organizations, so it is great to see them becoming available. Microsoft is looking to impress businesses with these features to encourage their quick adopting of the new OS and avoid another Windows XP problem. Microsoft has already announced that 12 million business PCs have already been updated to Windows 10.

48% IT professionals likely to consider Windows 10 Mobile, shows a survey

Windows 10 Mobile, shows a survey managed solution

If a new survey of IT Pros is some indication, Microsoft’s gamble with unified Windows 10 OS for various form factors may pay off well in enterprise segment. 48% of respondents said new Windows 10 Mobile features made them slightly or much more likely to consider it on tablets and smartphones.
Eighty-one and 77 percent of IT professionals said iOS and Android-based mobile devices are running in their organization, while Windows and Windows Mobile is used in a third of organizations. However, 48 percent of IT professionals said new Windows 10 features made them slightly or much more likely to consider Windows on tablets and smartphones. While new Windows 10 features such as Cortana, the Edge browser, and Continuum interface draw consumer attention, just 8 percent of respondents said they were interested in the touch-optimized interface and 6 percent cited Cortana. When asked for their general impressions of Microsoft’s new browser Edge, previously known as Spartan, a quarter of respondents said they were somewhat to very positive;, 23 percent said they were neutral, and nearly half said they didn’t know enough about the new browser to have formed an opinion. Four percent of respondents were somewhat to very negative.
Coming to interest in Windows 10 PC version, 96% respondents were found to be interested and 60% of IT departments were already testing it.
Nearly all IT professionals (96 percent) are interested in Windows 10, and 60 percent of IT departments have tested or are actively testing the new operating system, according to a survey of more than 500 respondents by Spiceworks.
Source: http://www.nokiapoweruser.com/48-it-professionals-likely-to-consider-windows-10-mobile-shows-a-survey/
Interested in learning more about Windows 10? Join Managed Solution at one of our Windows 10 Roadshow events for a demonstration on the new features in Windows 10 and mingle with industry experts!

Click on a Local Roadshow Location to REGISTER

Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - Irvine, California
Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - Los Angeles, California
Friday, August 7, 2015 - Scottsdale, Arizona
Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - San Diego, California

Windows 10 – Improving the Enterprise Experience by Collecting the Opinions of Large Corporations

windows 10 july 29

Windows 10 – Improving the Enterprise Experience by Collecting the Opinions of Large Corporations

Thought-Leadership by Jon Nicponski
Microsoft is going to great lengths to ensure Windows 10 is better received than its predecessor. Unlike the experiment with Windows 8, Windows 10 Developers have gone out and engaged large corporations to discern which features they needed. Product support was involved from the first on Windows 10 in order to maintain the vision for a common experience across device platforms.

Regular Maintenance Makes for a Reliable Enterprise Solution

Probably most important to enterprises, the start menu is back, so user confusion will be an absolute minimum. There are a LOT of features that make Windows 10 a compelling upgrade including much improved security, but here we will focus on how easy that upgrade will be to accomplish.
Automated updates used to NEVER be an in-place upgrade option, but now, Microsoft has enabled the ability to do an automated update that is un-attended from Windows7/8. This update can take as little as 7 minutes.
The update carefully inspects the machine and if there are ANY known issues it behaves as you have configured by either rolling-back or displaying the errors. In fact, the US Air Force, one of the fastest adopters of new Microsoft technologies, will be using the in-place upgrade.
Microsoft’s recommended upgrade path for Enterprises is to go direct via unintended upgrade 7-10, 8->10, 8.1->10. There is not a Vista or an XP direct upgrade path.
There are some scenarios where an upgrade won't work, for instance with X86 to X64 systems. Also, the base language needs to be the same. As an example, you can’t have a base language of German and try and upgrade with Base language of English.
In-place upgrades can also happen other ways, included SCCM, or even a batch file sent via email that points to your customized source media.
Changes were made to SCCM/WSUS for compatibility, so make sure you get the updates to these tools for preparing and deploying your new images!

Simplified Deployment and Provisioning

The preview for the new Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is available now, with all the tools to do image creation for windows 10. The final version is scheduled for the launch on July 29th.
There were some early issues with 3rd party encryption products because the Windows pre-execution environment did not have drivers for some of the vendors. Microsoft and these vendors are working hard to have these issues resolved by the release date. A couple of security companies are going to create a management engine for Microsoft Bitlocker and drop their own encryption. This is HUGE: it will be the least expensive way to use Microsoft Bitlocker in an enterprise environment. Previously you had to purchase Windows Enterprise plus the MDOP product to get the Microsoft Bitlocker Management Studio.

What happens when an employee leaves with a Windows Enterprise enabled device?

To help corporate IT better manage devices, Windows 10 can re-provision a machine from Pro to Enterprise and connect to a domain in the process. You will also be able to roll-back a machine from Enterprise to Professional if the machine isn’t domain joined. For now, Microsoft recommends joining the machine to an Azure domain (a new feature of Windows 10), which can be rolled back. Microsoft is working on the ability to roll-back Enterprise to Professional on domain joined machines, however, this will likely not be a feature in the released product.
Lastly, if an employee leaves the company and has Windows Enterprise installed on their BYOD, the Windows Enterprise version won't be able to see the company’s KMS server, so after 180 days, the end user will get a watermark, and some reduced functionality on updates. Microsoft is recommending AADJOIN (Azure Active Directory Join) for BYOD devices so that they can easily have company specific information removed and rolled back to Windows Pro.
For more information on Windows 10, tune in to SoftwareONE Tech Talk on the SoftwareONE Radio Network every other Wednesday of the month where we talk regularly on IT topics, especially Windows 10 as we get closer to the date. Click the banner below and fill out the form to receive information on joining this innovative radio show!
Source: http://blog.softwareone.com/windows-10-improving-the-enterprise-experience-by-collecting-the-opinions-of-large-corporations/