Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise deployment file released

Over the last few days several outlets have reported about the release of Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise on MSDN.

While they have been accurate, what was actually made available on MSDN for subscriber downloads was just an XML file and not an entire ISO for installing Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise.

I reached out to Microsoft yesterday to ask for more specifics about this file and its relationship to Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise and this is the official response from a company spokesperson:

“Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise, Version 1511 is now available to MSDN subscribers. The download file is 611KB as the image includes only the XML file that you have to deploy on any Windows 10 Mobile device to turn on the Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise features on it. There is no full image in the case of phone as it is delivered as an OTA update.”

That means enterprise customers who plan to have Windows 10 Mobile devices in their organization can deploy this file to those devices once they have been updated to the official release build of Windows 10 Mobile which is expected this month.

That in turn will activate these features for those devices:

Management and Deployment

Security

Delivering Windows as a Service

Items marked with a (*) are only available with Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise; all others features listed above are also available on Windows 10 Mobile.

As you can see the two areas of significant difference between Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise are related to the side-loading of line of business apps (unlimited versus just 20 on Windows 10 Mobile) and controlling the delivery of updates to the mobile OS.

Just like with Windows 10 on the desktop, enterprise customers can manage the flow of updates to their companies Windows 10 Mobile devices in order to maintain compatibility with line of business apps.

If you want to learn more about Current Branch for Business updates check out this summary over at our sister site - Windows IT Pro.

But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.