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You're reading from  Mastering Windows 365

Product typeBook
Published inSep 2023
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781837637966
Edition1st Edition
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Operating Systems
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Authors (3):
Christiaan Brinkhoff
Christiaan Brinkhoff
author image
Christiaan Brinkhoff

Christiaan Brinkhoff works as a Principal Program Manager and Community Director for Windows 365 and AVD at Microsoft, in his role at Microsoft, he works on features such as Windows 11, Windows 365 app, Switch and Boot. Christiaan is also an Author (3 books) and Inventor (3 patents). His mission is to drive innovation while bringing Windows 365, Windows, and Microsoft Intune closer together, drive community efforts around virtualization to empower Microsoft customers in leveraging new cloud virtualization scenarios. Christiaan joined Microsoft in 2018 as part of the FSLogix acquisition. He has also been rewarded with the Microsoft MVP, Citrix CTP, and VMware vExpert community achievements - for his continued support in the EUC community.
Read more about Christiaan Brinkhoff

Sandeep Patnaik
Sandeep Patnaik
author image
Sandeep Patnaik

Sandeep is a virtualization veteran with nearly two decades of experience in the industry. He has shipped multiple billion-dollar products and cloud services for Microsoft to a global user base including Windows, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Windows 365. His contributions have earned him multiple patents in this field. Currently, he leads a stellar team that is responsible for building the product strategy for Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop services and shaping the future of end-user experiences for these services.
Read more about Sandeep Patnaik

Morten Pedholt
Morten Pedholt
author image
Morten Pedholt

Morten works as a Cloud Architect for a consultant company in Denmark where he advises and implements Microsoft virtual desktop solutions to customers around the world, Morten started his journey as a consultant over 8 years ago where he started with managing client devices but quickly found a passion for virtual device management. Today Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop are the main areas that are being focused on alongside Microsoft Intune. Based on all the community activities Morten has done in the past years, he got rewarded with the Microsoft MVP award in the category of Windows 365 in March 2022.
Read more about Morten Pedholt

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Deploying applications to Cloud PCs

Applications are incredibly important as without them, users cannot be productive. Microsoft Intune supports application delivery as a core component of the unified management services it offers.

In the following steps, you will learn how to deploy applications to your Cloud PCs. Microsoft Intune supports the following application types:

  • The Microsoft Store app (new):
    • Store-based applications (e.g., the Windows 365 app).
  • A line-of-business app:
    • Windows apps (.msi, .appx, .appxbundle, .msix, and .msixbundle).
  • A Windows app (Win32):
    • A custom or in-house Win32-based app. Upload the app’s installation file in the .intunewin format.
  • A Windows web link:
    • With this option, you can add web apps (SaaS) to a user’s start menu – the All apps list.
  1. Go to Apps | All apps to start the application deployment process.
  2. Click on + Add.

Note

The process of targeting apps to physical PCs is almost identical...

Backing up and restoring Cloud PCs

Windows 365 Enterprise allows you to configure point-in-time restore settings, giving you the option to set the frequency of restore points and determine whether end users are allowed to initiate a restore action.

How do restore points work?

Restore points are a point-in-time snapshot of a Cloud PC. These allow administrators and users to recover to a last known good state or a state at a particular time if a Cloud PC enters an undesirable state. There are three types of restore points:

  • Short-term
  • Long-term
  • On-demand

A short-term restore point interval can be set in a user setting under the User Settings section in Microsoft Intune. There is a maximum limit of 10 restore points for each Cloud PC. You can choose between 4, 6, 12, 16, or 24 hours when configuring the policy. The longer the intervals you set between each restore point, the longer the period you can go back. If you don’t configure a user setting with...

Summary

In the chapter, you learned everything about managing Windows 365 Cloud PCs via Microsoft Intune, setting up configuration policies, deploying applications, resizing, and allowing users to reset their own Cloud PCs.

In the next chapter, we will go deeper into the world of end user experiences and show you how Windows and Windows 365 have come together to provide new integrated experiences with Windows 11.

Questions

At the end of each chapter, we ask three questions to evaluate your learning and challenge you. Here are the three questions:

  1. What Azure Storage service does Windows 365 use to capture a copy of a user’s Cloud PC for forensic analysis? Does Windows 365 support bulk restore point actions?
  2. How do you set short-term restore points for Windows 365 Cloud PCs?
  3. Can Cloud PC users become local administrators?

Further reading

Please continue your learning journey while exploring the other chapters. If you want to learn more about the subjects covered in this chapter, please visit any of the following online resources:

Bulk device actions

To manage your Windows 365 Cloud PC environment, you sometimes need to push configuration settings to the endpoint.

Under Devices | Windows, you can find your endpoint objects to perform individual device actions on, such as the following:

  • Sync settings
  • Power on/off (frontline Cloud PCs only)
  • Restarting the Cloud PC
  • Restoring to a previous point in time
  • Reprovisioning the Cloud PC
  • Resizing
  • Collecting diagnostics
  • Windows Defender settings (scanning, updating an agent, etc.)
  • Rotating a local admin password
  • Configuring remote assistance
  • Placing the Cloud PC under review (eDiscovery)

Luckily, you are able to enable most of these settings in bulk. The following screenshot provides a view of the individual actions.

Figure 4.26 – A device actions overview

Figure 4.26 – A device actions overview

If you go back to Devices | All devices, you can see the Bulk Device Actions option on the menu:

Figure 4.27 – An All devices overview
...

Configuring configuration profiles

For many years, IT administrators have used Group Policy Management to configure and control the end user devices in their environment. There is no question that Microsoft Intune has come to rule the management aspect of end user devices. With Microsoft Intune, you can configure and control your end user devices as you used to, but this is now handled with Configuration Profiles (Configuration service providers or CSPs), which is a more modern and simplified way to manage your devices.

The good thing about Windows 365 is its integration with Microsoft Intune (https://intune.microsoft.com/); this means all the effort and time that is put into a Microsoft Intune environment can be reused for Windows 365 Cloud PCs.

You might already work with Intune and have experience with CSPs. If so, that is great. We hope you are still able to find some valuable information in this section about CSPs and learn how to manage the assignment. We will look at a...

Deploying applications to Cloud PCs

Applications are incredibly important as without them, users cannot be productive. Microsoft Intune supports application delivery as a core component of the unified management services it offers.

In the following steps, you will learn how to deploy applications to your Cloud PCs. Microsoft Intune supports the following application types:

  • The Microsoft Store app (new):
    • Store-based applications (e.g., the Windows 365 app).
  • A line-of-business app:
    • Windows apps (.msi, .appx, .appxbundle, .msix, and .msixbundle).
  • A Windows app (Win32):
    • A custom or in-house Win32-based app. Upload the app’s installation file in the .intunewin format.
  • A Windows web link:
    • With this option, you can add web apps (SaaS) to a user’s start menu – the All apps list.
  1. Go to Apps | All apps to start the application deployment process.
  2. Click on + Add.

Note

The process of targeting apps to physical PCs is almost identical...

Backing up and restoring Cloud PCs

Windows 365 Enterprise allows you to configure point-in-time restore settings, giving you the option to set the frequency of restore points and determine whether end users are allowed to initiate a restore action.

How do restore points work?

Restore points are a point-in-time snapshot of a Cloud PC. These allow administrators and users to recover to a last known good state or a state at a particular time if a Cloud PC enters an undesirable state. There are three types of restore points:

  • Short-term
  • Long-term
  • On-demand

A short-term restore point interval can be set in a user setting under the User Settings section in Microsoft Intune. There is a maximum limit of 10 restore points for each Cloud PC. You can choose between 4, 6, 12, 16, or 24 hours when configuring the policy. The longer the intervals you set between each restore point, the longer the period you can go back. If you don’t configure a user setting with...

Summary

In the chapter, you learned everything about managing Windows 365 Cloud PCs via Microsoft Intune, setting up configuration policies, deploying applications, resizing, and allowing users to reset their own Cloud PCs.

In the next chapter, we will go deeper into the world of end user experiences and show you how Windows and Windows 365 have come together to provide new integrated experiences with Windows 11.

Questions

At the end of each chapter, we ask three questions to evaluate your learning and challenge you. Here are the three questions:

  1. What Azure Storage service does Windows 365 use to capture a copy of a user’s Cloud PC for forensic analysis? Does Windows 365 support bulk restore point actions?
  2. How do you set short-term restore points for Windows 365 Cloud PCs?
  3. Can Cloud PC users become local administrators?

Further reading

Please continue your learning journey while exploring the other chapters. If you want to learn more about the subjects covered in this chapter, please visit any of the following online resources:

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Mastering Windows 365
Published in: Sep 2023Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781837637966
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Authors (3)

author image
Christiaan Brinkhoff

Christiaan Brinkhoff works as a Principal Program Manager and Community Director for Windows 365 and AVD at Microsoft, in his role at Microsoft, he works on features such as Windows 11, Windows 365 app, Switch and Boot. Christiaan is also an Author (3 books) and Inventor (3 patents). His mission is to drive innovation while bringing Windows 365, Windows, and Microsoft Intune closer together, drive community efforts around virtualization to empower Microsoft customers in leveraging new cloud virtualization scenarios. Christiaan joined Microsoft in 2018 as part of the FSLogix acquisition. He has also been rewarded with the Microsoft MVP, Citrix CTP, and VMware vExpert community achievements - for his continued support in the EUC community.
Read more about Christiaan Brinkhoff

author image
Sandeep Patnaik

Sandeep is a virtualization veteran with nearly two decades of experience in the industry. He has shipped multiple billion-dollar products and cloud services for Microsoft to a global user base including Windows, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Windows 365. His contributions have earned him multiple patents in this field. Currently, he leads a stellar team that is responsible for building the product strategy for Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop services and shaping the future of end-user experiences for these services.
Read more about Sandeep Patnaik

author image
Morten Pedholt

Morten works as a Cloud Architect for a consultant company in Denmark where he advises and implements Microsoft virtual desktop solutions to customers around the world, Morten started his journey as a consultant over 8 years ago where he started with managing client devices but quickly found a passion for virtual device management. Today Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop are the main areas that are being focused on alongside Microsoft Intune. Based on all the community activities Morten has done in the past years, he got rewarded with the Microsoft MVP award in the category of Windows 365 in March 2022.
Read more about Morten Pedholt

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