Windows 11 onboarding and demo lab test kits
Published Jul 22 2022 11:35 AM 520K Views
Microsoft

To make it easier for you to plan for, test, and validate Windows 11 in your environment—and prepare your end users and management teams for a familiar, but fresh user experience—we’ve created two robust and downloadable kits.

The updated Windows 11 and Office 365 Deployment Lab Kit contains a complete lab environment including evaluation versions of Windows 11 Enterprise, Windows Server 2022, and a collection of tools which allow you to test and conduct a proof of concept for Windows 11 deployment. The Windows 11 Onboarding Kit provides a collection of materials that you can use to help prepare your users and ensure that they get the most out of Windows 11.

Windows 11 brings many new features to IT professionals and knowledge workers. And as with anything new, there are also new things for IT administrators to learn.

Windows 11 Onboarding Kit

I’m sure you are already familiar with the large collection of documentation available to help you deploy Windows 11 across your organization. With the Windows 11 Onboarding Kit, our goal is to also provide you with the materials you need to prepare, educate, and support your end users in their Windows 11 journey.

From years of deploying major operating system updates to a globally diverse and highly mobile workforce, Microsoft has learned that successfully transitioning to a new technology requires planning ahead with thoughtful and proactive communications, deploying the upgrade with expertise and speed, and supporting employees with post-deployment training and materials. The Windows 11 Onboarding Kit can be used to support a Windows 11 deployment to all devices within a global enterprise. The materials facilitate employee adoption, promote best practices, and ensure a direct path to productivity.

The kit consists of three parts:

  • Plan. Access documents and schedules to help create timetables for the Windows 11 upgrade. In addition, there are sample employee emails and promotion materials.
  • Deploy. While most of the details of the Windows 11 upgrade will come from documentation, we also provide a demo, Microsoft case study, and a guide to changing browsers from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Edge (as IE isn’t included in Windows 11).
  • Support. Employees will probably have questions following the Windows 11 upgrade so this part of the kit provides quick reference guides on things like OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Edge, Universal Print, and keyboard shortcuts.

Documents in the onboarding kit are in both Word and PowerPoint formats so they can be easily customized with company logos and names, localized, and augmented with links to internal resources. The images can also be replaced. In addition, we have a collection of resources like whitepapers, datasheets, and demos for you to use as needed.

Want to help us improve future versions of the Windows 11 Onboarding Kit? Submit your feedback.

Windows 11 and Office 365 Deployment Lab Kit

Many IT professionals rely on a fully functioning test environment to ensure a smooth OS update or upgrade. The Windows 11 and Office 365 Deployment Lab Kit not only offers a set of labs and evaluation software to help plan for, test and validate a Windows 11 deployment, it helps you explore and test advanced desktop management scenarios as well. The labs cover Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, the Office Customization Tool, OneDrive, Windows Autopilot and more. Additionally, as an isolated environment, the lab is ideal for exploring deployment tool updates and testing your deployment-related automation.

The guide is divided into eight sections:

  • Lab setup. This section guides you through the steps required for setting up the on-premises (Hyper-V) lab environment and joining it to trial versions of Azure and Intune.
  • Plan and prepare infrastructure. For a successful deployment you must first know what you have. That means taking an inventory of your devices and apps and verifying compatibility. Additionally, this section details how to concurrently manage Windows 11 devices by using both Configuration Manager and Microsoft Intune. Co-management can help you get more out of your existing Configuration Manager deployment by unlocking additional cloud-powered capabilities like conditional access.
  • Deploying Windows 11. With everything prepared, the next step is to deploy the OS images. This section will cover deploying Windows 11 using Configuration Manager to both bare metal systems, as well as existing capable Windows 10 systems via Upgrade. It also covers Windows 11 deployments using Windows Autopilot.
  • Servicing Windows 11. Upgrading to Windows 11, both current and future versions, can be done using Windows Servicing. This section will cover how to use Configuration Manager and Windows Update for Business to upgrade using Windows Servicing.
  • Managing Windows 11. This section covers how to manage Windows 11 using Microsoft Intune. First by enrolling devices, next, configuring Software Updates and other policies that can be enforced using Intune.
  • Preparing/Deploying Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise. Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise is the modern office suite. This section will cover the various ways how Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise can be deployed using Intune, Configuration Manager or local methods. It also covers the different ways to manage and service Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise using each of these tools.
  • Managing the new Microsoft Edge. The new Microsoft Edge enhances and extends the browser experience. It runs on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android devices and comes native on Windows 11. This section covers how to update it using both Intune and Configuration Manager, and how to manage policies using both Intune and GPO.
  • Security and compliance. This section covers Windows 11 security capabilities that can enable organizations to become more secure, including BitLocker device encryption, Windows Defender Antivirus and Windows Hello for Business.

Our goal is to make the Windows 11 upgrade process as smooth as possible. We hope these kits help you go beyond our documentation by providing a fully independent test environment and materials to help employees get productive quickly on Windows 11.


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Last update:
‎Feb 02 2023 12:56 PM
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