For me this was the best keynote ever for all Microsoft’s events I’ve been at, virtually or physically. Wrapped up after three hours, I want to give you guys a heads up for what is happening in my area of expertise, Enterprise Client Management.
The conference is being held in Chicago and has over 20K people in the house. If you want you can watch a replay of this morning’s keynote on demand at http://news.microsoft.com/ignite2015/
Most Important Ignite Keynote Announcements from an enterprise Client Management perspective
– Windows Update for Business – This is an advanced version of what you already know today and it’s called WSUS. Together with Windows 10 it will allow you to control which machines get Windows Updates or even feature updates. Integration with your existing tools like System Center and the Enterprise Mobility Suite – so that these tools can continue to be that ‘single pane of glass’ for all of your systems management.
– Office 2016 Public Preview – Available for Office 365 subscribers and those who want to run the full standalone install. This version will really kick down the #EMS offering on IOS , Android or Windows. Office will be the key in the whole mobility story.
– Windows Server 2016 – A second technical preview is now available for download and testing and will allow you to unlock some additional Hybrid functionallity , such as updates for Hyper-V ,ADFS , Workfolders , etc .
– System Center 2016 – Has new provisioning, monitoring and automation abilities for your data center. A new preview will be available soon online
· New technical preview for ConfigMgr 2016 for Windows10 available for a trial at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-system-center-configuration-manager-and-endpoint-protection-technical-preview
New features in today’s Technical Preview includes:
- Support for Windows 10 upgrade with OS deployment task sequence
- Support for installing Configuration Manager on Azure Virtual Machines
- Ability to manage Windows 10 mobile devices via MDM with on-premises Configuration Manager infrastructure
· New service packs for Configuration Manager 2012 and 2012 R2 (They will be released somewhere next week)
These will deliver full compatibility with existing features for Windows 10 deployment and management as well as several other features, including:
- App-V publishing performance
- Scalability improvements
- Content distribution improvements
- Native support for SQL Server 2014
- Hybrid Parity (Intune) and new features
– Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics – Brings on premise Azure AD level security monitoring and threat detection. This software/service is the result of Microsoft’s acquisition last November of Aorato and it’s a great add-on for EMS and AD premium. The preview is available now from here.
During Brad Anderson’s piece of the keynote, his team showed 11 different technologies on stage and here are links to all of those services and programs:
- The New Outlook App: A Modern Standard for Secure E-mail
- Enhanced Data Protection with Windows 10
- Windows 10 Device Guard
- Azure RemoteApp
- Document Tracking & Secure Collaboration with Azure RMS
- SaaS Management with Cloud App Discovery
- Detecting Anomalous Sign-Ins with EMS
- Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics
- Deploying Azure in Your Datacenter
- The Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS)
- Power BI in SCCM
I hope that you are as thrilled and exited as myself and that we can show you all these cool things in our own lab and we hope that we can see you at one of our SCUG.be events.
Hope it helps,
Kenny Buntinx
MVP Enterprise Client Management MVP