Today, Microsoft revealed a slew of changes to various parts of its Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Many of these aren’t all that exciting (as it certainly depends on your degree of excitement for products like Microsoft endpoint Manager), however, the overarching thrust behind this update is to make life simpler for IT administrators who help supply and maintain Windows- and Mac- computers, which is much more important now, considering how many businesses are trying to adapt quickly.
For them, the highlight of today’s collection of announcements if certainly an upgrade to Windows Virtual Desktop, the service offered by Microsoft to give workers access to a virtualized desktop environment on Azure, enabling IT departments to host several Windows 10 sessions on the same hardware. The business is introducing a whole management interface for this service that makes it considerably easier for administrators to get started.
Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Microsoft 365, told me ahead of today’s announcement that it took a tremendous amount of Azure experience to get going on this project. You still need to know a little about Azure with this update, but the overall process of getting started is now considerably easier. And this is more important now than ever, Anderson remarked.
“Many companies stated that they are using the (virtual desktop infrastructure) on-prem. They had to go out and do research to free up power. That means, in some cases, stopping disaster recovery for some of their programs to get the power,” Anderson said. “In some cases, I hear leaders saying that it will take until mid or late May to get the extra capacity to spin up required VDI sessions.”
Anderson claims that remote work will continue to be even more common until things return to normal- whenever it happens and however looks. “I think the use of virtualization where you virtualize executing an app in a cloud data center and then virtualizing it down will increase. That will introduce a secular trend and cloud-based VDI growth,” he said.
Microsoft is now also making it possible to use Microsoft teams for video meeting in these virtual meetings in these virtual desktop environments, in addition to making the management experience easier, using a feature called ‘A/V redirection’ which allows users to connect their local audio and video hardware and virtual machines with low latency. It will, however, take another month or so to carry out this feature.
Also new is the ability for legal and regulatory reasons to hold service metadata regarding usage of Windows Virtual Desktop within a certain Azure area.
The big news here for those of you who are interested in Microsoft Endpoint Manager is improved support for macOS based computers. With the new macOS Intune MDM client, administrators can use the same method to handle repeat tasks on Windows 10 and macOS.
Conclusion:
Productivity score- a product that would love only an enterprise manager- is also getting an update. For instance, in OneDrive and SharePoint, you can now see how people in a company read, write, and collaborate around content. And if they aren’t you should write a memo, and encourage them to work better together.
