Bill Predmore, president and co-owner of professional women's team the Seattle Reign, has enough to think about without managing PCs. "I don't want to think about technology," he told CIO.com. "I would like it to be like a software application where I flip a switch and also it just works."

So, in December 2017, the Seattle Reign ventured into a private preview of Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD), a replacement desktop management service from Microsoft, which Predmore observed in advance given that the company is an organization sponsor. With MMD, corporate customers receive access to Microsoft 365 using a modern device that is definitely managed by Microsoft.

For a Seattle Reign it implies a mix of Surface laptops, some Surface Pros which have been used on the park and off, and then one Surface Studio. Microsoft will also support devices from HP and Dell, using the baseline for support a spec including a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip, biometric login, and high-quality drivers.

Microsoft 365 combines Windows, Office and Microsoft's Enterprise Mobility and Security management service, and MMD locks done that even further. "We don't allow third-party agents to exercise, to minimize the numbers of background agents running," says Microsoft General Manager Bill Karagounis. "It's an exceptionally native stack secured by Windows Defender and Defender ATP, monitored by us inside security operations center it means that you're not compromising it life and gratifaction of devices you have five or ten agents running at all time."

Predmore has been amazed by the results, essentially how smoothly Windows feature updates and monthly security updates have always been.

"Technology is a potential competitive advantage for you but I'm forever about somebody ending up with a virus," Predmore says. "Now too security is managed by Microsoft my partner and i just don't need to bother about it."

The Seattle Reign's familiarity with MMD sheds early light on the organizations might expect in letting Microsoft manage their Windows 10 fleet.

Desktop as an effective managed service

For most people organizations, the same as the Seattle Reign, desktops are becoming a commodity, while there is little competitive benefit of be reaped from managing them. Apart from need highly customized desktop experiences with handcrafted group policies, and BYOD has accelerated the shift in managing the information users have access to rather than the devices they access it with. Within this increasingly cloud-enabled world, access control is king, with encryption and credential protection being far more important than being behind the firewall.

For some time, Microsoft has offered consumers the selection of buying PCs devoid of the pre-installed bloatware OEMs often include. These "Signature Edition" PCs reportedly improve your speed and have longer life of the battery. MMD is the leased-equipment business equivalent, nevertheless with ongoing management to stop PCs properly setup.

This combination of hardware and services may be the bet Microsoft is making with MMD: that organizations will leave patching and testing updates for application compatibility behind and only higher-value business tasks.

"On paper, customers who sign up for Microsoft's new service get with more speed Windows and Office 365 transitions on Surface hardware with one throat to choke if something goes wrong or is insecure. That is certainly different because they many different parties come to mind with other management schemes," says Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

"Microsoft finally gets its possibility to show the quality of ease faster transitions are often," Moorhead says. "This is a big chance to learn for the enterprise and Microsoft."

What MMD way for your organization

The complexness of managing previous versions of Windows has meant that handing over PC management to managed providers and outsourced It became rarely economic. Microsoft is betting that its new versions of Windows and Office - along with its cloud analysis and management tools - succeed cost effective to bring over desktops at scale, whether that management is done by Microsoft; OEMs as an example Dell and HP, which already offer on-demand device replacement; or partners just like Avanade/Accenture and Computacenter.

Microsoft has "tens of buyers" for MMD in the uk and US, including large, regulated organizations like Lloyds Banking Group and furthermore SMBs like Seattle Reign. Karagounis says the MMD baseline caters for large regulated companies but "we attributes needed smaller organizations different options with things they don't choose to light up purely because they're too heavy-duty."

This system will expand to Canada, Australia and New Zealand in early 2019 together with other geographies later during. Some customers demand a direct relationship with Microsoft, although later on Karagounis expects partners will give you "the lion's share" of those kind of managed desktop services. Microsoft uses tools like Autopilot that are accessible to partners and departments additionally it's documenting the configuration employed by MMD. "We're sharing the reference architecture and baseline with these partners, for them to decide whenever they want to replicate or create top of this service to offer it on their customers."

At any time you're on Windows 7 call for help migrating applications to Windows 10, you need to deploy Office 365 or Azure Active Directory - a prerequisite for MMD - you'll also need a partner to further with that.

"This offering wouldn't happen minus the cloud," Karagounis tells CIO.com. "The idea that so much of our technology has been able to migrate into a cloud-based infrastructure means readily start doing such things as managing PCs throughout the cloud."

The cloud will keep to allow Microsoft to get both operational signals and security insights, and help it to learn from any problems MMD customers have so that you can improve the knowledge of all enterprise Windows customers, Karagounis says. Right here is same principle for the reason that Desktop App Assure program: When one customer reports an application compatibility problem, numerous other customers have likely the same problem but haven't reported it. Karagounis says Microsoft helps make "hundreds of changes" within the Microsoft 365 service based on running MMD for early customers.

One changes was automatically syncing the desktop and customary folders like Documents to OneDrive. "If our users drops a cup of joe on their PC, we'd like to be able to distribute them a new PC just as soon as they log in everything comes down and OneDrive has replicated their desktop and so the known folders at the device and the rest of the data," Karagounis says. "We want the gps unit to be effectively stateless, so that we can reset them and replace them at any point."

Microsoft also recently changed the setup experience for Azure AD customers. Previously, users could go to a new PC in relation to their enterprise credentials, obtain the desktop, you need to working with files while policy had been applied to install apps and encrypt the nuvi.

"For our larger, more regulated customers that wasn't acceptable," Karagounis explains. "They wanted every one of the security pieces it is in place by the time an individual could start doing things, therefore, the operational risk and security departments know, 'That user is locked down; they're running with standard user privilege; they've got each of the right policies before he or she can do anything on our corporate network.'"

MMD is definitely a enterprise service and in addition the price varies dependent upon the choice of devices.

For Seattle Reign's Predmore, the beginning returns have been worth it.

"In this last, the way we managed the specific situation where we didn't possess available resources to regulate the complexity for those level of services we want to provide was folks simply did not provide those services," according to him. "That limited our ability because we didn't have enough structure prepared to run the business how we wanted do. Because you look at the importance of the devices and software licences and you to definitely manage it, this really is both better and less costly."