December 5, 2024 • 18 mins
Welcome to Episode 390 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast, live from Microsoft Ignite 2024! In this episode Ben sits down for a chat with Melissa Grant, head of product marketing for Windows 11 Enterprise, Windows 365, and Azure Virtual Desktop at Microsoft. Melissa discusses her tenure at Microsoft and the evolution of cloud-based Windows offerings, starting with the launch of Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) five years ago and transitioning into Windows 365. They also discuss Windows 365 Link, Microsoft’s new dedicated endpoint device, designed for seamless, secure connections Windows 365 Cloud PCs. This device reduces the need for extensive IT management and resources by simplifying deployment process, and providing security benefits based on feedback from some of Microsoft’s customers.
Melissa Grant
Melissa Grant leads product marketing for Windows Enterprise, Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop within Microsoft Modern Work. She and her team are dedicated to delivering secure, productive and efficient commercial solutions so customers can do their best work with Windows.
- Melissa on LinkedIn
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Show Notes
Windows in the Cloud leadership spotlight: Melissa Grant, Windows Marketing
Windows 365 Link—the first Cloud PC device for Windows 365
Windows 365 Link Preview
Demo: Introducing Windows 365 Link
Windows 365 Link Documentation
What is Windows 365 Link?
About the sponsors
Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
Welcome to episode 390 of the Microsoft Cloud
IT Pro Podcast, recorded live from Microsoft Ignite
2024.
This is a show about Microsoft 365 and
Azure from the perspective of IT pros and
end users, where we discuss the topic or
recent news and how it relates to you.
In this episode,
Ben sits down for a chat with Melissa
(00:25):
Grand, head of product marketing for Windows 11
Enterprise, Windows 365,
and Azure Virtual Desktop at Microsoft.
They discussed Microsoft offerings,
specifically around Windows 365
and Microsoft's new endpoint device, Windows 365 link.
This is Ben. I am here at
(00:47):
Ignite again with Melissa Grant. Right? And make
sure I get your right last name right.
And do you wanna go ahead and give
a quick introduction,
who you are, how long you've been at
Microsoft, what do you do at Microsoft? Sure.
Anything like that? Great. Well, great to meet
you. Thank you for having me.
So I head up product marketing for Windows
(01:07):
11 Enterprise,
Windows 365,
and Azure Virtual Desktop.
I've been at Microsoft for about 14 years.
Most of that time in and around the
Windows
world. Okay. So it's been a great experience
most recently to bring Windows to the cloud.
We kind of think of it as the
last great workload to the cloud following Office
(01:28):
and Azure.
So that's been a lot of my focus
the past couple of years. Okay. Very cool.
And I've enjoyed it. So I did not
tell you this. I'm a Mac guy. So
I I like my Macs. I just switched
over to the new Surface Arm Plus Copilot
device. Excellent.
Welcome.
Thanks. But because of that, I've used Windows
365 and Mac for a while. Yeah. I
(01:50):
actually have customers that use ABD a lot.
So it it'll be interesting to talk about
some of the history because it sounds like
you've been with it for a while now,
like, from the launch of,
I guess, ABD and then put it into
Windows 365?
That's right. Yeah. So we launched ABD
actually 5 years ago at Ignite. Is my
(02:11):
math right? Yeah. 5 years ago at Ignite
2019. So our last really big Ignite in
Orlando,
that was the launch for ABD.
And we're super excited. Cloud VDI,
you know, great product with a lot of
precision
for Azure infra professionals,
you know, great fidelity, great optionality to be
(02:33):
able to have things like multi session.
And with a great show, great launch, and
then we all went home.
And ABD took off as you could imagine
because there was just such high demand for
virtual machines between the supply chain issues for
PCs and just literally the complexity of getting
people
set up for work from home Yep. When
(02:54):
the pandemic hit. And so the team started
thinking about
how can we scale?
And one of the pieces of feedback that
we got from our customers was we love
what this does and the quality of the
Windows experience it delivers, but we literally don't
have enough Azure infra IT people to stand
up all these virtual machines. Okay. Can you
(03:15):
please
make a SaaSified version of this for endpoint
managers
and just make it work at Intune? So
I can literally just go into Intune, set
up a Cloud PC, put the image on
it, push down the apps, and get it
out to, like, whoever needs it. And I
need it to be fast and I need
it to be really easy.
And so the team set to work and
(03:35):
we literally built this great hybrid work tool,
hybridly,
because the engineering team
was pretty scattered. The dev teams in China,
you know, the PM and product marketing teams
were kind of all home, some in Redmond,
some in Utah,
and we built this, you you know, SaaS
version of Windows really to respond to the
(03:57):
moment.
And customers really liked it because it gave
them what they asked for, which is just
really turnkey
Windows experiences
that looked and felt and acted just like
Windows,
but like yourself, could be used on any
device, including, you know, a Mac or, you
know, an older PC if but still use
the latest OS. So that's kind of the
(04:19):
history of it, and now we're 3 years
on and have really seen it take off
and especially in a number of areas.
And today announcing our first purpose built endpoint
for it. Yes. That was
so I did wanna talk about that because
that was exciting. I saw that Satya had
went up on stage. Mhmm. And I was
like, oh, I can't get one till April.
(04:39):
Mhmm. But I am excited about them. So
what how does this endpoint work? Because I
know traditionally, like, a lot of people maybe
use some other third party thin clients. Like
you said, you could use Mac, you could
use Windows, but this is like a dedicated
Windows 365
and the AVD
device? I was curious about that too because
(05:00):
I saw all the Windows 365. But Yeah.
What is this new device? Yeah. Well, the
name kind of says what it is. It
links you to the Cloud PC. That's what
it does.
And so this is another thing that we
built really in response to customer request.
So we launched Windows 365
boot a couple of years ago. So the
ability to have an admin setting that says,
(05:22):
when I log in, it's gonna take me
directly to my Cloud PC.
And customers wanted this because they had some
scenarios where, like, they don't have people using
local apps, they don't wanna have to manage
the image locally, just take me to the
Cloud.
Really easy. And they said, hey, could you
build an endpoint
that just does this?
Okay. Just make it as simple as that.
(05:43):
Just that. We just want a link to
the cloud, and we want it to be
low cost. We want it to be super
secure. Security was actually the big driver for
this
because we have certain use cases where we
just need people to be able to log
in to their cloud PC.
And so, like, that was the challenge we
took on. How simple and secure can we
(06:04):
make this thing? Okay. And then we discovered
a couple other affordances along the way.
You know, we were able to design something
that's very sustainable.
It's very durable.
It's very easy to set up. And so
just we're able to tick some boxes that
customers were really asking for for this kind
of endpoint.
Okay. And I'm I'm assuming too, and I
(06:24):
know Satya talked about it, is one thing
that I've had some customers struggle with is
you get the endpoints out there and naturally,
they have the 1 around Teams. They're doing
Teams audio. They're doing video calls. They're doing
all of that. And I know there's been
some work there around even the clients and
trying to optimize media, but is there other
stuff too in the link that then you
(06:45):
were able to do to even optimize
meeting experiences and some of those ops experiences
that I would say maybe with some of
the hardware offloading and some of the way
those work with thin clients, it can be
unpredictable
at best.
Yeah. We kind of think of it as
a as a 2 parter.
So the 2 things obviously that, you know,
slow down great video communication is either the
(07:07):
connection Yep. Or the actual speed at which
the the computing happens once you're there. Right?
Yeah. So it's either I can't log on
or now I'm here and it's choppy or
the video is slow or whatever it is.
And so we think of that as the
partnership. The links job is to make the
connection fast and secure. Okay. And then after
that, it hands off everything else to the
cloud PC.
(07:28):
So it does its physical job and the
cloud does its cloud job.
And so all of the affordances that you
have for teams and other video communication
in the Windows 365 service Uh-huh. Things like,
VDI 2 point o, things like,
you know, redirection.
All of that happens in the cloud,
(07:49):
not on the device. So they're not competing
for that experience. The the device's job is
just to get you there. The cloud takes
care of the rest. Got it.
Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage
your Office 365
environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt
your company's productivity? Intelligent is here to help.
(08:10):
Much like you take your car to the
mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to
best keep your car running, Intelligent helps you
with your Microsoft cloud environment, because that's their
expertise. Intelligent keeps up with the latest updates
in the Microsoft cloud to help keep your
business running smoothly and ahead of the curve.
Whether you are a small organization with just
a few users, up to an organization of
(08:31):
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They want to partner with you to implement
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That's intelligink
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(08:51):
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Remember, Intelligink focuses on the Microsoft cloud so
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So one question with that device, Going back
to, like, thin clients, it's typically thin clients
you have to manage them as well. Mhmm.
Is there management you have to do on
this on the linker because it's literally just
(09:14):
a link? It's
there's nothing people can do with it? There's
nothing you can do with it. Okay. Everything,
it's adminless. It's passwordless.
All the security cannot be disabled. Okay. So
all you do and we'll we'll actually show
a demo of this tomorrow in the general
session.
So all you do is you plug it
in. Okay. You enroll it in Entra. You
(09:37):
you go into your Intune console. It pulls
down all of your security baselines, your image,
and all your configurations.
Whatever you've set up in Intune, that's what
it's running, and that's it. Got it. So
Intune does pull those policies then down to
this Windows 365 link device? No. Not to
the device. It just ensures To the Windows
365. To the Cloud PC. PC. Yes. Got
(09:59):
it. Okay. But there's no way to
do an end run around that. Got it.
Yeah. Okay. Right. I'm thinking to customers that
I have because I do consulting as well
as Mhmm. When they go to Windows 365
versus ABD, is it a little bit more
of kinda going along that same theme that
you have with Windows 365 where they don't
have the larger teams to manage Yes. All
(10:19):
within clients
or
I don't wanna say necessarily only an SMB
play, but a little bit more on that
SMB
ease of management side,
that's where the link fits in with Windows
365
versus, I would say, the enterprises tend to
have that bigger
IT
staff that can handle some of that better.
They can, but one of the things that
(10:40):
we've heard from our customers is Mhmm. Their
IT resources and staffing is is finite. Right?
Like and there's so many new things that
people are adopting.
You know, copilot, advanced security, all of these
things, and they don't get more headcount for
it.
So, actually, a lot of our larger customers,
and Wells Fargo and Johnson and Johnson are
(11:00):
2 customers that are here with us this
week. Alright. We'll talk about this on Thursday,
is they were like, look.
We only had so many IT resources, and
we really wanted to have people spending time
on modernizing on prem infra, on adopting Copilot,
on
Copilot, on moving other workloads to the cloud.
This made it really easy for us to
not have IT work on that. Okay. So
(11:22):
they were like, it's so much easier than
on prem VDI. It's so much easier than,
you know, the other solutions we had, like,
whether it was,
you know, keeping old desktops running. Yeah. They
were like, we don't need to worry about
that because we're just moving to Windows 365,
and that's freeing up IT's time
and budget so that we can do other
(11:43):
new things. Got it. Focus on the other
stuff.
I've I've run into that a little I
SharePoint background. Mhmm. And that was one of
those things even the transition from on prem
to the cloud. It was you don't have
to have staff now to worry about SQL
Servers and
maintain patching servers and installing updates as now
we can focus on other stuff. So similar
mindset with Windows 365 and Lync is let
(12:05):
IT folks on things that enhance
the business, bring more business value, simplify
Yeah. How we deploy Windows to Exactly. Other
people. Yeah. Or And then they were like,
and make sure you do that while not
sacrificing either security or employee experience.
Because nobody wants to have, like, a mediocre
Windows experience Yep. So that they can have,
(12:26):
like, a miraculous Copilot experience. Like, those 2
things don't go together. So they were like,
give us
perfect, personal, high fidelity Windows 11 so all
my employees are happy, and then they also
have time to start using things like Copilot.
Yeah. And the security aspect is big too.
Like, when Satya came on stage today, that
was really cool to see. Everybody expected Copilot.
(12:48):
Yes. Right? Because Copilot AI,
but then to see him Copilot Copilot, there
were those 3 Copilot pillars, but then also
security. Yes. And I hear you talking about
that a lot too with Windows 365 with
this linked device is there's been a lot
of focus on the security aspect of it
as well Absolutely. Which has been really cool.
And is, do you see that even as
(13:08):
an aspect of why people are going to
Windows 365 versus personal devices instead of security?
Yeah. And, you know, VDI or virtualization tools
have traditionally had that element. Right? Otherwise, we'd
just let you run your apps on your
personal PC and, like, cross our fingers.
But what this has allowed them to do
is maintain consistency
in their security posture across endpoints. And so
(13:32):
people absolutely choose Windows 365 for security
because they're able to keep the same baselines,
for example, across their physical PCs and now
their cloud PCs.
So it gives them a more secure sir
security posture, and then they can also use
the same security tools. So we've introduced Hotpatch
type today, for example. Yep. Hot patch will
(13:52):
work on physical PCs and cloud PCs. You
do the same patching, same policies, all the
same thing.
And then with with the linked device as
well, you get the extra layer of, like,
hey. You can't even do anything locally. So
security is a big driver for our customers
for choosing
Windows 11 and Windows 365,
for sure. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And the
(14:14):
Windows link device, going to the security, it
doesn't even have a hard drive. Right? Did
I hear that right? There's, like, not even
any physical
storage
in that device? Yeah. Just enough to make
it run and make that connection. Okay. Yep.
Just just to perform the linking function. That's
cool. Yeah. And that's one thing I've heard
and one thing so from a security perspective,
like, I talked to some clients and they're
(14:34):
like, well, why don't they just deploy Intune
and manage all my devices with Intune where
I can remotely wipe them, do all of
that? Like,
what are some of those security security advantages
you've seen
over when you would compare
managing a physical device with Intune versus something
like Windows 365?
If if someone would come to you with
that question, why don't I just manage a
(14:55):
physical device with Intune versus Windows 365? What
are those benefits you see? Well, you manage
them both in Intune. So Windows 365 can
only be managed by Intune.
So a lot of our customers are coming
to us and saying and and there was
a big momentum to move towards cloud management
over the last couple of years. Again, I
think a lot of it was sort of,
like, how can we be more in, you
(15:16):
know, efficient and and do things remotely.
But a lot of customers were saying, hey.
I'm sort of living in Intune already.
What I would love for you to do
is give me more tools to make that
easier
and to make it more consistent. So if
I'm managing all my cloud PCs in Intune,
I wanna be managing Windows 365 in Intune.
And I then I want to be able
(15:37):
to have those things
be consistent in the image, in how we
push down apps, how we do updates, how
we patch, all of those things. So that's
been our orientation,
is that it's a first class Windows experience,
and it's super easy for IT because it
looks, acts, behaves just like Intune with a
couple of extra affordances
that you can't do on a physical device,
(15:57):
like the ability to wipe it, restore it,
and hand it off to somebody else, the
ability to resize it.
If someone's like, hey, I don't have enough
compute.
I need a or I have a new
dev project I'm kicking off. You can resize
that machine to mortgage Okay. More storage.
The other security benefit that it has also
(16:18):
managed in Intune is what Satya talked about
briefly, which is point in time restore.
So the ability to roll it back to
up to 10 preset
moments in time
by IT so that if something were to
occur,
whether it is I left it on a
bus
and now I need to log back in
and I need that thing that was on
(16:39):
the bus to be gone or whether it
is an incident occurs. So being able to
roll back
to an earlier protected state is another thing
we can uniquely do in the cloud. We'll
certainly look to bring that
type of resiliency
to other Windows endpoints, but it's kind of
everything good about Intune and Windows PC Management
plus some stuff in the cloud. Okay. Yeah.
(17:01):
Very cool. Well, we're out of time. Anything
else you wanna
end with? Anything else you want people to
know about Windows 365, Windows 365 link? Yeah.
I would just say, like, it was built
based on customer feedback and need.
The link was built based on customer requests
for, like, this is what we want.
And so I would just say keep the
(17:22):
feedback coming. Like, the team is super responsive
to feedback, loves hearing it, loves talking to
customers, and we will build what our customers
want. Alright. Awesome. And I'll get links from
you if people wanna reach out to you
if you're on social media and get those.
I'll put all of those in the podcast
notes. So thanks for being here. Thanks for
coming on, Melissa, and joining me, and it
was a pleasure talking to you and learning
(17:43):
a little bit more about it. Yeah. You
as well. Great to meet you. Alright. Thanks
a lot. Thanks.
If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
a 5 star rating in iTunes. It helps
to get the word out, so more IT
pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
If you have any questions you want us
to address on the show, or feedback about
the show, feel free to reach out via
(18:05):
our website,
Twitter, or Facebook.
Thanks again for listening, and have a great
day.
Welcome to episode 390 of the Microsoft Cloud
IT Pro Podcast, recorded live from Microsoft Ignite
2024.
This is a show about Microsoft 365 and
Azure from the perspective of IT pros and
end users, where we discuss the topic or
recent news and how it relates to you.
In this episode,
Ben sits down for a chat with Melissa
(00:25):
Grand, head of product marketing for Windows 11
Enterprise, Windows 365,
and Azure Virtual Desktop at Microsoft.
They discussed Microsoft offerings,
specifically around Windows 365
and Microsoft's new endpoint device, Windows 365 link.
This is Ben. I am here at
(00:47):
Ignite again with Melissa Grant. Right? And make
sure I get your right last name right.
And do you wanna go ahead and give
a quick introduction,
who you are, how long you've been at
Microsoft, what do you do at Microsoft? Sure.
Anything like that? Great. Well, great to meet
you. Thank you for having me.
So I head up product marketing for Windows
(01:07):
11 Enterprise,
Windows 365,
and Azure Virtual Desktop.
I've been at Microsoft for about 14 years.
Most of that time in and around the
Windows
world. Okay. So it's been a great experience
most recently to bring Windows to the cloud.
We kind of think of it as the
last great workload to the cloud following Office
(01:28):
and Azure.
So that's been a lot of my focus
the past couple of years. Okay. Very cool.
And I've enjoyed it. So I did not
tell you this. I'm a Mac guy. So
I I like my Macs. I just switched
over to the new Surface Arm Plus Copilot
device. Excellent.
Welcome.
Thanks. But because of that, I've used Windows
365 and Mac for a while. Yeah. I
(01:50):
actually have customers that use ABD a lot.
So it it'll be interesting to talk about
some of the history because it sounds like
you've been with it for a while now,
like, from the launch of,
I guess, ABD and then put it into
Windows 365?
That's right. Yeah. So we launched ABD
actually 5 years ago at Ignite. Is my
(02:11):
math right? Yeah. 5 years ago at Ignite
2019. So our last really big Ignite in
Orlando,
that was the launch for ABD.
And we're super excited. Cloud VDI,
you know, great product with a lot of
precision
for Azure infra professionals,
you know, great fidelity, great optionality to be
(02:33):
able to have things like multi session.
And with a great show, great launch, and
then we all went home.
And ABD took off as you could imagine
because there was just such high demand for
virtual machines between the supply chain issues for
PCs and just literally the complexity of getting
people
set up for work from home Yep. When
(02:54):
the pandemic hit. And so the team started
thinking about
how can we scale?
And one of the pieces of feedback that
we got from our customers was we love
what this does and the quality of the
Windows experience it delivers, but we literally don't
have enough Azure infra IT people to stand
up all these virtual machines. Okay. Can you
(03:15):
please
make a SaaSified version of this for endpoint
managers
and just make it work at Intune? So
I can literally just go into Intune, set
up a Cloud PC, put the image on
it, push down the apps, and get it
out to, like, whoever needs it. And I
need it to be fast and I need
it to be really easy.
And so the team set to work and
(03:35):
we literally built this great hybrid work tool,
hybridly,
because the engineering team
was pretty scattered. The dev teams in China,
you know, the PM and product marketing teams
were kind of all home, some in Redmond,
some in Utah,
and we built this, you you know, SaaS
version of Windows really to respond to the
(03:57):
moment.
And customers really liked it because it gave
them what they asked for, which is just
really turnkey
Windows experiences
that looked and felt and acted just like
Windows,
but like yourself, could be used on any
device, including, you know, a Mac or, you
know, an older PC if but still use
the latest OS. So that's kind of the
(04:19):
history of it, and now we're 3 years
on and have really seen it take off
and especially in a number of areas.
And today announcing our first purpose built endpoint
for it. Yes. That was
so I did wanna talk about that because
that was exciting. I saw that Satya had
went up on stage. Mhmm. And I was
like, oh, I can't get one till April.
(04:39):
Mhmm. But I am excited about them. So
what how does this endpoint work? Because I
know traditionally, like, a lot of people maybe
use some other third party thin clients. Like
you said, you could use Mac, you could
use Windows, but this is like a dedicated
Windows 365
and the AVD
device? I was curious about that too because
(05:00):
I saw all the Windows 365. But Yeah.
What is this new device? Yeah. Well, the
name kind of says what it is. It
links you to the Cloud PC. That's what
it does.
And so this is another thing that we
built really in response to customer request.
So we launched Windows 365
boot a couple of years ago. So the
ability to have an admin setting that says,
(05:22):
when I log in, it's gonna take me
directly to my Cloud PC.
And customers wanted this because they had some
scenarios where, like, they don't have people using
local apps, they don't wanna have to manage
the image locally, just take me to the
Cloud.
Really easy. And they said, hey, could you
build an endpoint
that just does this?
Okay. Just make it as simple as that.
(05:43):
Just that. We just want a link to
the cloud, and we want it to be
low cost. We want it to be super
secure. Security was actually the big driver for
this
because we have certain use cases where we
just need people to be able to log
in to their cloud PC.
And so, like, that was the challenge we
took on. How simple and secure can we
(06:04):
make this thing? Okay. And then we discovered
a couple other affordances along the way.
You know, we were able to design something
that's very sustainable.
It's very durable.
It's very easy to set up. And so
just we're able to tick some boxes that
customers were really asking for for this kind
of endpoint.
Okay. And I'm I'm assuming too, and I
(06:24):
know Satya talked about it, is one thing
that I've had some customers struggle with is
you get the endpoints out there and naturally,
they have the 1 around Teams. They're doing
Teams audio. They're doing video calls. They're doing
all of that. And I know there's been
some work there around even the clients and
trying to optimize media, but is there other
stuff too in the link that then you
(06:45):
were able to do to even optimize
meeting experiences and some of those ops experiences
that I would say maybe with some of
the hardware offloading and some of the way
those work with thin clients, it can be
unpredictable
at best.
Yeah. We kind of think of it as
a as a 2 parter.
So the 2 things obviously that, you know,
slow down great video communication is either the
(07:07):
connection Yep. Or the actual speed at which
the the computing happens once you're there. Right?
Yeah. So it's either I can't log on
or now I'm here and it's choppy or
the video is slow or whatever it is.
And so we think of that as the
partnership. The links job is to make the
connection fast and secure. Okay. And then after
that, it hands off everything else to the
cloud PC.
(07:28):
So it does its physical job and the
cloud does its cloud job.
And so all of the affordances that you
have for teams and other video communication
in the Windows 365 service Uh-huh. Things like,
VDI 2 point o, things like,
you know, redirection.
All of that happens in the cloud,
(07:49):
not on the device. So they're not competing
for that experience. The the device's job is
just to get you there. The cloud takes
care of the rest. Got it.
Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage
your Office 365
environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt
your company's productivity? Intelligent is here to help.
(08:10):
Much like you take your car to the
mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to
best keep your car running, Intelligent helps you
with your Microsoft cloud environment, because that's their
expertise. Intelligent keeps up with the latest updates
in the Microsoft cloud to help keep your
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(08:31):
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So one question with that device, Going back
to, like, thin clients, it's typically thin clients
you have to manage them as well. Mhmm.
Is there management you have to do on
this on the linker because it's literally just
(09:14):
a link? It's
there's nothing people can do with it? There's
nothing you can do with it. Okay. Everything,
it's adminless. It's passwordless.
All the security cannot be disabled. Okay. So
all you do and we'll we'll actually show
a demo of this tomorrow in the general
session.
So all you do is you plug it
in. Okay. You enroll it in Entra. You
(09:37):
you go into your Intune console. It pulls
down all of your security baselines, your image,
and all your configurations.
Whatever you've set up in Intune, that's what
it's running, and that's it. Got it. So
Intune does pull those policies then down to
this Windows 365 link device? No. Not to
the device. It just ensures To the Windows
365. To the Cloud PC. PC. Yes. Got
(09:59):
it. Okay. But there's no way to
do an end run around that. Got it.
Yeah. Okay. Right. I'm thinking to customers that
I have because I do consulting as well
as Mhmm. When they go to Windows 365
versus ABD, is it a little bit more
of kinda going along that same theme that
you have with Windows 365 where they don't
have the larger teams to manage Yes. All
(10:19):
within clients
or
I don't wanna say necessarily only an SMB
play, but a little bit more on that
SMB
ease of management side,
that's where the link fits in with Windows
365
versus, I would say, the enterprises tend to
have that bigger
IT
staff that can handle some of that better.
They can, but one of the things that
(10:40):
we've heard from our customers is Mhmm. Their
IT resources and staffing is is finite. Right?
Like and there's so many new things that
people are adopting.
You know, copilot, advanced security, all of these
things, and they don't get more headcount for
it.
So, actually, a lot of our larger customers,
and Wells Fargo and Johnson and Johnson are
(11:00):
2 customers that are here with us this
week. Alright. We'll talk about this on Thursday,
is they were like, look.
We only had so many IT resources, and
we really wanted to have people spending time
on modernizing on prem infra, on adopting Copilot,
on
Copilot, on moving other workloads to the cloud.
This made it really easy for us to
not have IT work on that. Okay. So
(11:22):
they were like, it's so much easier than
on prem VDI. It's so much easier than,
you know, the other solutions we had, like,
whether it was,
you know, keeping old desktops running. Yeah. They
were like, we don't need to worry about
that because we're just moving to Windows 365,
and that's freeing up IT's time
and budget so that we can do other
(11:43):
new things. Got it. Focus on the other
stuff.
I've I've run into that a little I
SharePoint background. Mhmm. And that was one of
those things even the transition from on prem
to the cloud. It was you don't have
to have staff now to worry about SQL
Servers and
maintain patching servers and installing updates as now
we can focus on other stuff. So similar
mindset with Windows 365 and Lync is let
(12:05):
IT folks on things that enhance
the business, bring more business value, simplify
Yeah. How we deploy Windows to Exactly. Other
people. Yeah. Or And then they were like,
and make sure you do that while not
sacrificing either security or employee experience.
Because nobody wants to have, like, a mediocre
Windows experience Yep. So that they can have,
(12:26):
like, a miraculous Copilot experience. Like, those 2
things don't go together. So they were like,
give us
perfect, personal, high fidelity Windows 11 so all
my employees are happy, and then they also
have time to start using things like Copilot.
Yeah. And the security aspect is big too.
Like, when Satya came on stage today, that
was really cool to see. Everybody expected Copilot.
(12:48):
Yes. Right? Because Copilot AI,
but then to see him Copilot Copilot, there
were those 3 Copilot pillars, but then also
security. Yes. And I hear you talking about
that a lot too with Windows 365 with
this linked device is there's been a lot
of focus on the security aspect of it
as well Absolutely. Which has been really cool.
And is, do you see that even as
(13:08):
an aspect of why people are going to
Windows 365 versus personal devices instead of security?
Yeah. And, you know, VDI or virtualization tools
have traditionally had that element. Right? Otherwise, we'd
just let you run your apps on your
personal PC and, like, cross our fingers.
But what this has allowed them to do
is maintain consistency
in their security posture across endpoints. And so
(13:32):
people absolutely choose Windows 365 for security
because they're able to keep the same baselines,
for example, across their physical PCs and now
their cloud PCs.
So it gives them a more secure sir
security posture, and then they can also use
the same security tools. So we've introduced Hotpatch
type today, for example. Yep. Hot patch will
(13:52):
work on physical PCs and cloud PCs. You
do the same patching, same policies, all the
same thing.
And then with with the linked device as
well, you get the extra layer of, like,
hey. You can't even do anything locally. So
security is a big driver for our customers
for choosing
Windows 11 and Windows 365,
for sure. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And the
(14:14):
Windows link device, going to the security, it
doesn't even have a hard drive. Right? Did
I hear that right? There's, like, not even
any physical
storage
in that device? Yeah. Just enough to make
it run and make that connection. Okay. Yep.
Just just to perform the linking function. That's
cool. Yeah. And that's one thing I've heard
and one thing so from a security perspective,
like, I talked to some clients and they're
(14:34):
like, well, why don't they just deploy Intune
and manage all my devices with Intune where
I can remotely wipe them, do all of
that? Like,
what are some of those security security advantages
you've seen
over when you would compare
managing a physical device with Intune versus something
like Windows 365?
If if someone would come to you with
that question, why don't I just manage a
(14:55):
physical device with Intune versus Windows 365? What
are those benefits you see? Well, you manage
them both in Intune. So Windows 365 can
only be managed by Intune.
So a lot of our customers are coming
to us and saying and and there was
a big momentum to move towards cloud management
over the last couple of years. Again, I
think a lot of it was sort of,
like, how can we be more in, you
(15:16):
know, efficient and and do things remotely.
But a lot of customers were saying, hey.
I'm sort of living in Intune already.
What I would love for you to do
is give me more tools to make that
easier
and to make it more consistent. So if
I'm managing all my cloud PCs in Intune,
I wanna be managing Windows 365 in Intune.
And I then I want to be able
(15:37):
to have those things
be consistent in the image, in how we
push down apps, how we do updates, how
we patch, all of those things. So that's
been our orientation,
is that it's a first class Windows experience,
and it's super easy for IT because it
looks, acts, behaves just like Intune with a
couple of extra affordances
that you can't do on a physical device,
(15:57):
like the ability to wipe it, restore it,
and hand it off to somebody else, the
ability to resize it.
If someone's like, hey, I don't have enough
compute.
I need a or I have a new
dev project I'm kicking off. You can resize
that machine to mortgage Okay. More storage.
The other security benefit that it has also
(16:18):
managed in Intune is what Satya talked about
briefly, which is point in time restore.
So the ability to roll it back to
up to 10 preset
moments in time
by IT so that if something were to
occur,
whether it is I left it on a
bus
and now I need to log back in
and I need that thing that was on
(16:39):
the bus to be gone or whether it
is an incident occurs. So being able to
roll back
to an earlier protected state is another thing
we can uniquely do in the cloud. We'll
certainly look to bring that
type of resiliency
to other Windows endpoints, but it's kind of
everything good about Intune and Windows PC Management
plus some stuff in the cloud. Okay. Yeah.
(17:01):
Very cool. Well, we're out of time. Anything
else you wanna
end with? Anything else you want people to
know about Windows 365, Windows 365 link? Yeah.
I would just say, like, it was built
based on customer feedback and need.
The link was built based on customer requests
for, like, this is what we want.
And so I would just say keep the
(17:22):
feedback coming. Like, the team is super responsive
to feedback, loves hearing it, loves talking to
customers, and we will build what our customers
want. Alright. Awesome. And I'll get links from
you if people wanna reach out to you
if you're on social media and get those.
I'll put all of those in the podcast
notes. So thanks for being here. Thanks for
coming on, Melissa, and joining me, and it
was a pleasure talking to you and learning
(17:43):
a little bit more about it. Yeah. You
as well. Great to meet you. Alright. Thanks
a lot. Thanks.
If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
a 5 star rating in iTunes. It helps
to get the word out, so more IT
pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
If you have any questions you want us
to address on the show, or feedback about
the show, feel free to reach out via
(18:05):
our website,
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Thanks again for listening, and have a great
day.
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