Christiaan Brinkhoff - Mastering Microsoft Endpoint Manager: Deploy and manage Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows 365 on both physical and cloud PCs

Deploy and manage Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows 365 on both physical and cloud PCs

Christiaan Brinkhoff

Per Larsen

BIRMINGHAMMUMBAI

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"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

African proverb

"With Windows 365, we are making Windows available not just on Windows devices, but any device, harnessing the power of the cloud."

Satya Nadella

Community is important for everyone: please consider sharing your knowledge to help others! Working together will help everyone get to a much higher level!

Christiaan Brinkhoff

"The way I measure my life is "Am I better than I was last year?""

Satya Nadella

"You renew yourself every day. Sometimes you're successful, sometimes you're not, but it's the average that counts."

Satya Nadella

The history behind Microsoft Endpoint Manager

I started at Microsoft as a developer right out of college in the early 90s. My first coding assignment was on Project Hermes, building an inventory and application delivery tool for the new operating system that Microsoft was about to release Windows NT. Project Hermes later became Systems Management Server (SMS) 1.0. I stayed on the project and eventually became the product and engineering owner responsible for building and releasing Configuration Manager 2007 and 2012. Right after releasing Configuration Manager 2012, I went to lead the engineering team for Intune/MEM and re-architected Intune to become the industry-leading cloud-based device management service. At the start of 2020, I was asked whether I was interested in leading the product and engineering effort for a new startup project called Cloud PC; I remembered saying sign me up because I saw it as the last piece of the puzzle to complete the full circle for device management.

When I joined Microsoft, device management as an industry didn't exist. With the introduction of SMS 1.0 and through Configuration Manager 2012, Microsoft created a new IT function device management. With Intune/MEM, we expanded device management from Windows devices to all devices and we brought device management to the cloud. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has existed for decades, but it has always been costly to set up and run and is difficult to adapt to changing business needs. With Windows 365 Cloud PC, we set out to democratize VDI. We want cloud PCs to be easy to provision and manage, just like how IT manages their physical devices today, and in addition, we wanted to remove much of the complexity and cost associated with VDI.

In the last year and a half, we built a brand-new Azure-based service to enable every MEM admin to provision and manage cloud PCs as easily as they can with their physical Windows PCs, or iOS/Android devices. With the full elasticity of Azure, the predictable pricing, and the ability to instantly purchase, provision, and resize cloud PCs, we are creating many new use cases for running a Windows PC in the cloud that cannot be easily achieved by traditional VDI or physical PCs.

On behalf of the hundreds of engineers and product managers that worked tirelessly in the middle of the COVID pandemic building the Windows 365 service, and to all the IT heroes everywhere managing and securing devices, we want to introduce to you a new category of PC Cloud PC. This book will help you to adopt Windows 365 quickly and gain new superpowers in device management.

Enjoy your newfound power.

Ken Pan

CVP Windows 365 & MMD at Microsoft

The history behind Cloud PC

I joined Microsoft in 2001 as a Hardware Technical Evangelist and Lead Program Manager for Networking. I worked with hardware partners to improve user experiences and expand the market for consumer networking products. During this time of my career, I created several patents around wireless setup, network discovery, and media streaming technologies. The culmination of this work led to the development and standardization of Wi-Fi Protected Setup and the adoption of a number of Microsoft networking technologies in common industry products. Working with partners to bring new value to customers was ingrained in my DNA and is something I have carried forward in my career.

During the Windows 7 era, I transitioned to media streaming and led the product team implementing video in HTML5, DRM, Media CODECs, and media streaming. My team delivered a number of new end user experiences including PlayTo and remote media access to Windows Media Player. From there I moved to the Xbox team to deliver SmartGlass for Xbox One.

About 10 years into my career at Microsoft, my interests led me to virtualization, which was a culmination of all the technologies I had worked on, such as home networking, audio and video encoding, DRM, media streaming, and device redirection. At that time, Microsoft's first-party virtualization offering (RDS) had a very limited feature set and scalability. Though the technology was heavily used by the tech community for accessing personal desktops, adoption was relatively small in the enterprise space (this was largely led by Citrix).

The RDS team was ripe with talented engineers who had focused their entire careers working on virtualization and the partner ecosystem was clamoring for opportunities to engage with Microsoft to deliver value-added services. This combination of a large talent pool, ready and willing partners, and continued growth of virtualization use cases created just the right environment to develop a new virtualization platform that could reach a broader audience.