MicrosoftJason_Leznek Do you have any updates on this ? It seems as if Microsoft has recognized the problem with the decision however no commitment to follow up on it.
Please help us understand how we address this issue. There is no clear path forward at this time. We cannot work with the 5 IoT Microsoft partners to get what we need. We work with hundreds of scientific vendors that sell equipment to us. If it is up to the vendors, they would provide a Win10 PRO with their instrument and we would be left to deal with feature updates etc. The equipment vendors do not want us applying any updates when they sell a windows computer with an instrument device. They tell us to leave it as-is. Don't put it on a company network, domain, apply regular updates, etc. That is not realistic in todays world. Additionally, these vendors to not understand lifecycle management and keeping software up to date. When Windows 10 came out in 2015, they did not even start providing compatible software until 2017-2018. Our world is always behind the regular office desktop refresh cycle and it takes twice as long to refresh the fleet. Each single system requires validation activities to ensure compliance with regulatory authorities (ie FDA). Every individual patch install is tracked and records archived permanently. Bigger changes require more extensive testing and documentation. Imagine this for hundreds of devices globally.
As an enterprise we have chosen to standardize on hardware, OS and security tools. To do this we have to provision the windows PC used to control that scientific device. We thought Windows 10 LTSB was great when MS announced this in 2015. A lifecycle more aligned to our world and less impactful changes between versions because "Windows 10 is the last OS" Well Microsoft has once again changed directions and this decision was made with assumptions that all scientific device vendors will work with your pre-chosen 5 IoT vendors. If this is what you expect us to deal with then I believe it is up to Microsoft to engage these companies to work through the issue.
Microsoft, please go work with these vendors to tell them to work with your preferred vendors so they can provide us what we need with scientific equipment. If you google "Top instrument vendors" you will have a good list to start with.
ThermoFisher Scientific
Waters
Agilent
Danaher Corp
Shimadzu
Bruker
Bio-Rad
Mettler Toledo
Illumina
Talk to these companies about what type of computer they sell with their instruments please. If you can get them to provide the 10 year 2021 LTSC ioT enterprise we wouldn't have the problem we have.
Alternately, change the stance and allow enterprise to deploy the 10 year IoT Enterprise
Thanks
