Windows 10 - initial research

Where do I start?!
Gartner's "Ten Things You Need to Know About Windows 10 for a Successful PC Deployment" for IT managers or executives (PDF).

The New User Experience with Windows 10 from Microsoft Ignite in May of 2015 (1 hour video).

Minasi's Guide to Managing Windows 10: New Windows, New Tools (a hilarious 1 hour video covering a lot of ground for IT Pros)

If you have a large amount of unstructured time in your life, you may enjoy perusing the entire collection of Windows 10 videos from the May, 2015 Microsoft Ignite conference.

You've upgraded to 10, hard drive crashed, and are now reinstalling.  Where's the product key?!
According to this report, when Windows 7 or 8 is upgraded to 10, your new product key is kept in the Windows Store account associated with your Windows account, so if a complete reinstall is needed, you won't be prompted for a product key.

What's in it for the end user?
Coming from Windows 7, this is a downgrade.  The UI is ugly and WindowsBlinds isn't available yet.  Also, it has bugs...for example, as of 10/10/2015 the "Enable shortcut underlines" accessibility setting in Control Panel doesn't stay "On" when you try to change it from "Off".

Coming from Windows 8.1, this is an upgrade.  You get the "Start" menu back.

Microsoft's decision to abandon the UI options in Windows 7 (transparency, detailed and colorful icons) will result in continued loss of market share to Apple in the consumer space.

What's in it for the IT manager?

Not much...yet.  Windows 10 is laying a foundation for future growth and as such, it's not very pretty at the moment.  You could say that it's basically Windows 8.1 with a better engine, a Start Menu, and better integration with Microsoft's $16,000,000,000 Azure cloud investment.  Someday (I hope!) Windows 10 will be really nice.  Microsoft's vision of the future is that Azure + Windows 10 will offer the most secure and manageable tools for your company's digital assets.

How do you deploy this to 50 computers in a small business?
  • Here's a TechNet write-up explaining how to use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit for that.
  • Alternatively, you could just download the ISO, mount and share it on your file server, then walk to each desktop and run an in-place upgrade that way.