The return of Microsoft Ignite is generating a lot of excitement, with in-person and virtual events in the Seattle area and around the world. In the spirit of the occasion, we've created an exciting YouTube video, "Behind the Screens of Windows Autopatch: Ignite Edition" full of quick reports from experts and engineers celebrating where we've been and where we're going.
Watch the entire video now, or if you prefer to read over watching and listening, we'll cover the top-line news featured in the video and at Ignite in the rest of this post.
While we have spoken before about the value and capabilities of the service, the vision for Windows Autopatch, especially in context of the larger Microsoft endpoint management story hasn't been front and center. In the Ignite Special we bring Josh Pointer, Partner Director of Product Management, and Gideon Bibliowicz, Senior Director of Product Marketing, together to explain that vision. In essence, Windows Autopatch is an application of the Microsoft mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. By letting Microsoft take responsibility for managing updates to Windows and Microsoft 365 software, IT departments will have more capacity to achieve their goals.
The relationship between our customers and our engineers is critical. Opening channels for feedback and closing the "loop" by piloting features based on that feedback has already contributed to the evolution of the service. This loop is so important that we have a dedicated Customer Acceleration Team with engineers who are focused on delivery optimization and nurturing the loop between developers and end users. Bev Ashton and Mark Florida are both Principal Group Product Managers, representing the Customer Acceleration Team and Product Group respectively, and in their session, they discuss how to balance features and usability, and how the feedback loop feeds that constant process. They highlight the move to "app-only authorization" and enriching the device readiness assessments as examples of taking customer feedback and iterating the service quickly, and they discuss balancing feature requests with keeping the service simple.
Mark sticks around for another segment in the video, where he and Senior Product Manager Adam Nichols, a former enterprise IT admin, discuss some of the top benefits of Windows Autopatch. This segment is ideal for anyone who wants to get up to speed quickly on the top benefits of Autopatch including how Autopatch provides peace of mind with progressive deployment, the security benefits of automatic updating, updating Windows 365 Cloud PCs, and the Windows Autopatch reports that make compliance easier.
In a chapter dedicated to working with Autopatch now and in the near future, we cover the incident response and support capabilities of the service with Principal PM Manager Saki Tong and Product Manager Clara Kennedy. The gist? Your questions will get answers—sometimes before you ask them—through the tenant administration blade of Microsoft Intune, where messages and support requests are managed.
Aleks Lopez, the Principal PM Manager for App Assure, shares the commitment to compatibility that should give IT admins confidence in the Autopatch service with this promise: if your apps were working before an update, they'll make sure they work after one. The App Assure team has a great track record here, and there are resources to engage with internal and third-party teams if compatibility issues should arise.
Questions about the "difference" between Windows Update for Business and Autopatch come up a lot. In their discussion, David Mebane, the Principal Program Manager Lead for Windows Update for Business, and Chris Tulip, a Principal Product Manager on the Autopatch team, lay out a useful metaphor: Windows Update for Business is a toolbox, and Windows Autopatch is a carpenter.
Chris and his colleague Sierra Olson preview the ability to manage Feature updates that's coming soon to Autopatch. The initial phase will allow updates to progress through deployment rings over a longer period of time to ensure a more thorough evaluation. The second phase will allow IT admins to monitor specific applications in their environment for more meaningful performance measurements and offer historical reporting on top of the current status device reporting that will roll out in phase 1.
Melissa Grant, the Senior Director of Product Marketing for Windows 11, announces that Windows Autopatch will support the update from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and shares how the operating system and the Autopatch service both help organizations "do more with less." For more on this topic, watch this Microsoft Mechanics episode on Windows Autopatch and Windows 11 updates.
Sierra and Principal PM Manager John Vintzel introduce the more sophisticated Microsoft 365 update management capabilities coming in the first quarter of 2023. These include the ability to incorporate progressive deployment and pause/resume capabilities in the first phase. Future iterations will allow admins to manage Microsoft 365 workloads independently of the service while still getting Windows updates, or to support update channels other than the Monthly Enterprise Channel.
In response to popular demand, the Autopatch team is introducing the ability to subdivide device populations into Business Groups. Principal PM Manager Viraf Gandhi and Senior Product Manager Andre Della Monica broadly explain how users will be able to manage the speed and schedule of update deployments for these groups. There's a lot of new functionality coming with this feature, so we'll be diving deeper into this topic in a future post.
Viraf and Principal Product Manager Vinnie Flynt discuss the ways that Autopatch can support Azure Virtual Desktops, and how the service can lighten the load for IT admins who make use of these versatile endpoints. The gist is that Autopatch makes sure there's enough time to make an update, and it doesn't spin up instances independently just for updates, so they are always available for customer use.
If all this still hasn't satisfied your Autopatch appetite, join the conversation at Aka.ms/AutopatchCommunity and find more videos on the Windows IT Pro YouTube Channel We'll also have a fresh demo and an Ask Microsoft Anything session at the upcoming Technical Takeoff event – find more details at Aka.ms/TechnicalTakeoff.
For the latest updates on new releases, tools, and resources, stay tuned to this blog and follow us @MSWindowsITPro on Twitter.
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