Adam Smith and Rex McMillian sit down to set up a quick clip from their original Windows 10 webinar presented on June 20, 2018. They bookend this short clip from their webinar. Think of it as a five-minute mini webinar.

Watch the full Windows 10 webinar here

Below is the abbreviate transcript of this brief mini webinar:

[Adam and Rex introduction to the Windows 10 webinar quick clip.]

[Webinar quick clip]

Rex: …So what does this really mean to us? It means that on a release cadence Microsoft is coming out, these channels, they come out, they're supported for 18 months. You got Insider Preview for six months prior to that. So basically, for two years you can be watching a channel. Now, every six months, this is going to occur. That's why the question we had in the poll, how often do you think you'll you be able to skip one of these? Because they actually do have an 18-month lifespan. So that would mean if you do skip one, you would have to hurry to get on the next one because you don't have a very long window of overlap, but that's the release cadence that we have.

So, what does it look like from an enterprise viewpoint? Well, we're going to have to run little projects on each of the different channels, a ring as on a branch. So we've got to have an Insider Preview. We're gonna have two or three projects on Insider. We're going to be testing our applications, we're gonna be testing our networking, we're gonna be testing, and hopefully, even having some people run that application. So we'll have three or four projects happen on Insider Preview. 

When the semi-annual channel comes out, we'll have a few new projects. We'll have our application owner start to do some work. So when they get [inaudible 00:19:05] view, these are the types of project we would expect to see happening. We'll see some application owners being tested. We'll be seeing some that all labs are upgraded. And throughout this semi-annual channel or the targeted release, we would get so we have that confidence that when we determine it's business ready, we're able to run it across all over enterprise. And at that point in time, it just switches to a full roll out project that we're working on.

Adam: So these are very short projects, right?

Rex: They're very short projects and they have to be very controlled so that we don't allow us to get mired down in those projects. Now, Microsoft has heard from the customers, there's been a lot of negotiations and discussion about how and what is the proper rate. So in the last few weeks, Microsoft just made a few announcements, and the first announcement here is that Windows 10 has an additional six months of servicing if you're on educational or enterprise versions. So if you're on an education version, Microsoft heard very loudly from the school industry, "Hey, we can't do upgrades during the middle of the school year. We use our summers to do that." And so they looked at the release schedules, it made sense to give them an extra six months of support. Enterprise customers had those same kind of conversations. So there's additional six months of support. So now you have 24 months if you're on those versions. Now if you want to crack open your piggy bank...

Adam: Yeah, I was gonna say...

Rex: There's an additional six months you can purchase. So you can get an additional 12 months of support for educational and enterprise only.

Adam: Oh, really, beyond that.

Rex: Beyond that. So there's six months of free and there's six months of piggy bank time. So get your piggy bank out, shake it a little bit, and you can buy additional six months.

Adam: And if you're not on enterprise or education?

Rex: There is probably no additional support.

Adam: There isn't? Even if you crack open...

Rex: Not at this time.

Adam: Oh, okay, you can't even crack open the piggy bank.

Rex: No, I think there is only for educational and enterprise. 

Adam: All right, so that's a really nice thing if you're in education and you're really worried about trying to make sure you do those upgrades when you don't disrupt students. 

Rex: So here's the support matrix. This shows you how long it is. So you can see that the end of support is six months prior to the end of servicing for enterprise and education. So for 1709, if you have education version, you can actually run until October of 2019 giving you a full two years of support on that channel. 

Adam: We've actually ended support for 1511, haven't we?

Rex: Yes, there's actually two or three versions of Windows 10 now that are out support: 1503, 1511. All of those are out of support now. 

[Adam and Rex review the key points of this section of the webinar:

  • Your processes must support Windows-as-a-Service cadence
  • You can skip one update, but you can't skip two updates and stay in compliance
  • Microsoft adds 6 months for Enterprise and Education editions

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