A calendar approach for keeping the modern workplace up to date

As organizations everywhere juggle the challenges of business continuity, remote work, and keeping devices up to date, we want to reinforce the plan, prepare, and deploy approach for Windows servicing with tactical guidance that you can use when you are ready to consider rolling out the next Windows 10 feature across your organization.

In recent blog posts, we’ve discussed how to optimize Windows monthly update deployment for remote devices and how to deploy a new version of Windows 10 in a remote world. These posts provide prescriptive guidance to help enterprises take updates regularly using our recommended data-driven servicing approach with tools such as Windows Update for Business. Today, we want to introduce a calendar-based approach to help you stay current with Windows 10 by implementing an ongoing process, inspired by modern cloud-based tooling, that enables a fluid cadence for updating devices across remote and on-premises environments.

This new calendar approach creates a single view of Windows, Office, and Configuration Manager release cycles to help reduce the complexity of updating an operating system (OS) for any business, regardless of size, and provides flexibility for using multiple calendars across various user scenarios. Calendar timelines can be shortened or expanded to meet the needs of your organization. For example, if you take Windows 10 feature updates as they are released, your calendar might look something like this:

Figure 1. Windows 10 rapid deployment calendar

To support your adoption of this calendar approach, we are working to consolidate and update our prescriptive guidance on Docs and have created some targeted resources to help you plan, prepare, and deploy, including:

• Stay current with Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 Apps, a new learning path on Microsoft Learn that contains three modules of prescriptive guidance to walk you through the plan, prepare, and deploy phases.
• Update Baseline for Windows 10, a set of Microsoft-recommended policy configurations for Windows 10 that help you optimize deployment and device management plus a comprehensive guide containing real-world best practices and important considerations.

To get started on shifting from project-based to a process-based servicing approach, read my more detailed post on how to Transform Windows feature updates with a servicing calendar. I also invite you to bookmark the Windows 10 servicing discussion board on Tech Community as this is where we'll be posting deeper looks at how to use the calendar and hosting events, such as office hours, to answer your questions. We hope these new investments will assist your organization in staying current, and we look forward to hearing how you are using these resources to support you when updating Windows. Please share your thoughts below!