33 www.managedITmag.co.uk WINDOWS 11 n Do they have the right level of processor and RAM? n What applications are people actually using day-to-day versus what’s been deployed? n Are there enough licences for these applications? n Are users having performance issues? Historically, this was primarily a laborious manual process. Today, you can automate necessary analysis, using powerful desktop monitoring tools and – within minutes – collect detailed information about the devices, applications and performance of your estate. This accelerates the assessment phase such that informed decisions can be made quickly about what needs to happen regarding the migration. Simply put, this helps customers understand what devices will run Windows 11, what devices could be repurposed and what devices need to be changed and bought net new. In addition, you get insight into the software employees use day-to-day and therefore what applications need to be tested to make sure they continue to work. There's also a strong argument that in any migration it's good practice to review and consolidate applications in use. If a company has been paying an annual application licence fee for 1,000 people, but the analysis shows only 750 use the software, it’s an opportunity to scale down to save money. w Migration To do the actual migration, Microsoft Intune or technologies from Avanti are typically used to push out the new OS, irrespective of whether the user is office-based or working from home. Desktop monitoring tools can add value in two main areas. First, gathering user sentiment feedback from employees through surveys. This helps IT departments assess the success of a deployment by asking staff questions like: n How did the migration go? n Did everything work correctly? n Were there any issues experienced during the migration phase? Second, these tools also mean that technical staff can remote manage and remote control a user’s desktop to review and fix issues. This can get really granular, with ‘remote shell’ functionality allowing the actual configuration of a device (with no need to buy third party tools to do this). e Optimisation Without doubt, operating system migrations cost money. For organisations running the current version of Windows 10, the actual software upgrade to Windows 11 is free. But once you factor in the time to do all the planning, app testing and migration work, the hidden and actual costs are considerable, especially if you have to buy new hardware. To get the most out of this investment, organisations should be looking to optimise and transform how they manage their estates. By rolling out digital employee experience (DEX) management tools as Windows 11 goes in, customers will get significantly more visibility and understanding of their IT around questions such as: n How are their desktop and app environments performing? n What’s the employee experience like? n How are devices functioning? n Where are bottlenecks and issues? This allows IT departments to be more proactive and responsive to staff needs, reduces support tickets and ultimately puts them in control of their whole end user compute environment rather than it controlling them. Back to the Countdown show. In one of the games, contestants are given vowels and consonants which they have to put in order to make the longest word possible. It’s now time for all organisations to order their end user compute environment if they are to effectively, quickly and safely adopt Windows 11. Simon Townsend is Global Field CTO of ControlUp, which is reimagining Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management with real-time visibility, enabling 20X faster issue resolution on any desktop, any application, anywhere. ControlUp provides actionable, true AI-driven insights and proactive remediation tools to drive unbounded productivity for IT teams and employees. Nearly 2,000 customers across the globe trust ControlUp, including more than one-third of the Fortune 100. https://www.controlup.com.
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