How are you managing windows 10 feature updates?

[glenimp617]

Since Windows 10 support only lasts for 18 months (30 if you are on Enterprise or Education) how are you all handling feature updates? I've decided against LTSB due to having a lot of surface devices and requiring the advanced ATP support.

Does deploying servicing updates, or upgrade task sequences go smoothly?

I'm thinking of staggering a plain old school reimage across our estate every 30 months.

 

[glenimp617]

5,000 machines, although last year I considerably reduced those by using zero thin client terminals and next year we are heavily investing in a beast of a VDI platform. That should reduce the full blown windows machines to around 1,500 - 2,000.

With a team of two......YES TWO supporting 5,000 machines....zero clients and VDI is a must. It's all about working smart with as much automation as possible with the size of our team!!

We are already on SCCM 1806 which is working really well for updates, but I just wondered about feature updates. My initial thoughts about just reimaging them seems to hold weight. Luckily we also went down the AppV route when we started rolling out Windows 10 which helps massively in not having to think about locally installed software.

The team presents stats each Friday and we can clearly see how many windows 10 machines we have, and what version they are all on.

 

[glenimp617]

5000?! with the 2 of you, they must really hate you!

I'm guessing your geo scope is limited? I've dealt with company's of similar size and there is no way they could use appv for anything more than ~10% of there end users being spread out all over the place.

I wouldn't touch inplace upgrades if you can help, if you have the automation already setup then re-imaging is by far the better solution imo.

MS may be ok with using its customers as a test bed but id much rather go through the hassle of testing than to come in oneday to find half the estate has some random bug. (documents redirect to onedrive as an example!..)

No, I manage the team but staffing costs are limited. We only have two guys looking after the desktop estate among other things.
Three main sites, links are good so AppV is a winner. The packages are all cached though.

 

[glenimp617]

We chose to ignore them, now we'll have to revisit our fleet of 11,000 machines spread over 35 countries because no-one listened.

Mind me asking what apps do you have in that format? does it leave you with literally zero apps to install? Also what do you mean by cached? Cached on the local machine so they don't need to talk to the app v server too much?

The SCCM gold image contains Windows 10, Office 2016, All stuff like .Net and C++
The Task Sequence installs Google Chrome locally and a firewall agent

Everything else is AppV. You either have the choice to cache or stream. Basically caching pulls the package from the network and keeps it on the local disk. The end user notices no difference between a locally installed app, and one running from AppV.

Doing this for stuff like Java apps is a godsend as you can run different versions of java on the same machine via what's called connection groups. If anything needs an update or tweak, we do it once and everything filters down across the network.

There are a few small exceptions. We have a few machines which need some massive applications, or weird old ones which hook into drivers so we just either install those manually, or deploy from SCCM.

 

[glenimp617]

you've done exceptionally well to organise all that between 3 of you. I was in a team of 4 focussing on these kind of technologies with the backing of 2 outsourcers at my disposal and we didn't reach a solution as slick as that. No outsourcers we went to seemed to know what they were doing either so it relied upon a high level of technical awareness/competency internally.

haha, you must be joking. I did it all myself. The other two were apprentices on 1st line not long ago.
I'm basically group head of IT, third line engineer and tea boy

Not going to mention about all the international sites. They do pay me well though, and I'm left to do what I like so I'm happy.

The real saviour though is RDS and VDI through dumb linux terminals. Without that we'd really be up poo creek.

 

[glenimp617]

Businesses around the world now have less than a year to move off Windows 7.....and they still don't understand the Windows 10 lifecycle model eek!

How do some of these managers, become managers?