Microsoft Ready to Manage the Modern Desktop for Customers

The announcement from Redmond earlier this week about the new Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD) program was interesting based on its timing just one week before the company hosts more than 26,000 IT professionals in Orlando, Florida for their annual Ignite conference.

If there was a subject more appropriate to unveil in front of this crowd during Satya Nadella's Vision keynote Monday morning or the other technical keynotes later that day, the new MMD is certainly top of that list.

I am sure we are going to hear mentions of this new program during those keynotes and in sessions throughout the week. My recommendation for attendees wanting to learn more about MMD is to mark session BRK3320 (75 minutes on Wednesday) as must-see viewing. Bill Karagounis is one of Microsoft's General Managers and led the team which developed MMD. In addition, there is a shorter theater session, THR3093 (20 minutes on Monday) by Microsoft Senior Product Marketing Manager Nathan Mercer, which provides a whirlwind tour of the new initial offering.

Note: Both of these sessions will be streamed live in real time and available for on-demand viewing afterward from the MyIgnite portal.

So just what is this new MMD service from Microsoft?

According to Karagounis, it merges Microsoft 365 Enterprise, device-as-a-service, and device management via the cloud. Microsoft uses these elements to take care of the day to day management of a businesses on-premises hardware. This, in turn, allows the IT staff to participate more in the business side of the company instead of the daily routine of maintaining these modern desktops.

In developing this new program, Microsoft has noted two key benefits for customers that deliver on this device as a service offering:

Great experience with Microsoft 365 on modern devices: Our goal with MMD is to provide a great experience for users while keeping devices secure and up to date. MMD relies on the power of Microsoft 365, running in a consistent, lightweight, reference architecture that continues to evolve to allow our customers to take full advantage of our intelligent security capabilities to protect them from nascent threats. Importantly, MMD is built on modern devices that meet our specification and runtime quality bar.

Analytics benefit all customers: Analytics are at the heart of MMD. We leverage analytics to provide operational and security insights and learnings, so we can constantly monitor and improve, as well as enable us to manage the global MMD device population. As an example, we use insights and AI to determine which devices are ready for feature updates or, conversely, whether a specific app is blocking a device’s ability to update so we can act.

Right now, MMD is being used by a small number of customers in the United States and the United Kingdom. Service will start up in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in early 2019 with several other geographies being added in late 2019.

It seems Microsoft understands a program like this must be slowly and methodically tested and rolled out in order to build the trust factor for customers considering a move to MMD. By taking this steady state pace, they will be able to ultimately have the data to prove its effectiveness and tweak processes to make it even more reliable.

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Next week is Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, Florida, and ITPro Today will be there bringing you coverage throughout the week. If you are unable to attend in person this year, Microsoft has shared that all sessions will be live streamed and available online for on demand viewing soon afterward. This is a first for Microsoft Ignite and all you need to do for that access is register at Microsoft's MyIgnite website for full access. The Vision and Technology keynotes will be accessible to any viewer without registering on the MyIgnite website.