gshaw

Seems to be the impression I'm getting... pay EES to get Office 365 "free" but any on-prem services no longer have discount past 2018... So basically we may end up paying a subscription for O365 alone, which will likely include some form of Windows 10 OS as part of the overall "platform" as Nadella put it a while back. Hoping I'm wrong but...

1) For FE & HE customers what will our pricing look like after June 2016, will on-site infrastructure licenses i.e. Windows Server, SQL Server etc. become considerably more expensive i.e. >20% cost increase 2) After 2018 will EES effectively become a paid subscription to Office 365 Education with no other licenses available for on-premises servers? 3) If our on-premises licenses get removed what alternative are MS going to provide e.g. in Azure considering many organisations have critical services running on Microsoft server platforms e.g. MIS systems that don't have a suitable cloud equivalent?

@Arthur you tend to be in the know with a lot of MS news, what do you make of this announcement?

Agree with many of the above, although this change seems a cynical way of protecting revenues via forcing people onto Azure whether it's the best place for (all) services or not. If our EES pricing shoots up in June (I'm in FE) it doesn't suggest MS can be trusted longer term not to ramp it up again. Google will be enjoying this news I imagine...

It's one thing going cloud with O365 (which we've done and embraced what MS give us) but quite another if they're going to hike up everything else so we end up with Azure / O355 or nothing. Reading the blog I do wonder what's going to happen on our EES renewal in July as we have SQL, Windows Datacenter etc. that stand us no benefit to move to cloud, in fact an Azure VM would be way more expensive. If MS force us to drop their infrastructure more likely than not Google will be the migration path instead. Makes you wonder the logic behind this, is it just money or are MS shooting themselves in the foot by trying to force our hand into subscription services where their competitors may end up being a better option?

@Arthur yes we do have 2013 installed, will give it a shot

It'll just be a different vendor, most likely the Government's new best buddies at Google given the tax story recently

Has this MOU only changed this week in relation to MS discontinuing the EES discount? Just reading the dates on the document it's been around for some time in some form but updated Jan 2016?

If it's anything like the strokes they've tried to pull with Azure AD I won't be holding my breath. License EES by FTE then try and hit us for per-user pricing on key parts of the suite... not impressed.

Just trying to digest this, we're on yearly EES at the college so are MS suggesting after 2018 any on-prem products i.e. Windows Server, SQL and so on are going to become significantly more expensive and all we'll get at low cost is O365 and add-on subscription products? If so it looks like time to go Google...

Random question of the day, if you pick an average, fully patched Windows 7 desktop how big does the C:\WINDOWS folder come out at? Our older 60GB drive SSD machines are really filling up now and the bulk of it seems to be sitting in there, the usual suspects of WinSxS and SoftwareDistribution being some of the worst offenders. A clean install off a Win7 SP1 ISO is down at 12GB which is a huge difference. Was going to rebuild another base via MDT to try it out would be interested to see some other "in the field" stats.

The only thing that may have something to do with it is the fact the device is a Linx 1010, not entirely convinced of the quality of the drivers or Wi-Fi chip reading some of the comments on the forums The proxy issue could be more problematic though...

Just deployed an Azure AD-joined tablet to one of our staff but it seems to be the case that they have to manually connect to a Wi-Fi network each time at the login screen otherwise sign-in times out \ fails. Is this something odd with the machine I'm working on or is it default behaviour? Azure AD sign in also seems to fail with auto-detect proxy, wouldn't be surprised if this is an issue but again anyone else experiencing the same?

@garethedmonson was looking at this OS|DC: Windows 10 : Deploying a customized start menu Sounds like it will edit the default profile so any new users should get the template Start Menu, not tried it yet though

Nice find, now if the Start Menu would deploy nicely from GPO (hopefully import during MDT Task Sequence workaround method will do for now)

Was looking at 2016 on our Windows 10 tablets but there's an SSO bug with O365 that's holding us back from deploying it in that scenario. On desktops the crashing 2013 has made us consider upgrading but no concrete plans yet

What have you heard about the new client out of interest?

I've found this Fallout to be a bit lacking in dialogue options. At some points in the story it feels too linear and I can only talk to certain people and others have to be left in the dark about story-defining moments (trying to avoid spoilers haha) That said some of the hidden side quests are really good, especially where they're a bit on the creepy side - Fallout has a knack of doing those well.

The last version thing is just marketing, how many sub-releases of W10 have we had already Windows 10 will eventually be a Trigger's broom scenario after a few years' worth of build updates. That's probably where the subscription model will kick in at some point, perhaps bundled up with O365 as a whole platform service as opposed to being a product in its own right. As for the competition, device price is getting almost equivalent at the low end between Windows and Android, then there's the interesting next move for Google in terms of merging Chrome OS and Android (if they actually do it). Fragmented OS versions and poor vendor support is Android's biggest flaw right now, can Google claw back control somehow?

Near the end now, with all the exploring I've done I have a huge weapons stash with more of the power weapons than I know what to do with Best gun is an exploding ammo submachine gun with all the add-ons, followed by 200-damage shotgun... boom

Was going to ask the same thing, we're on O365 but want to make use of Chromebooks. Have seen some posts about ADFS SAML logins but not too much on how well the Chromebooks work. Don't want to make the sign in process cumbersome so interested to see how you get on.

Same problem here, was told LTSB would be better but doesn't seem to be from our testing and the results above. Was hoping removing the junk Modern apps would help but it doesn't seem to have made much difference. Over a minute on first login is awful, especially in the shared trolley scenario without roaming profiles. I'm still hoping for a fix equivalent to the WinMail registry hack that sped up Win7 logins no end but not holding my breath given the Start Menu issues etc.

Currently trying to figure out some quandaries I'm having with Win 10, in particular with some of the challenges on mobile kit. Would like to get some second opinions as I'm finding it hard to justify some decisions at present: In my head I've got the devices split into two use case scenarios: Staff devices, issued in a 1:1 model i.e. long term loan Student devices, shared trolley use model Staff devices: Joining these to Azure AD seems to make a lot of sense as they spend most of their time away from the domain and accessing Office 365 services. Setting up MDM policies in Office 365 looks good and means we can manage encryption and so on. That said I can see quite a few devices in MDM already that seem to have been used for what I assume are mobile Office apps so so somehow need to figure out how force our organisation-owned devices to be force encrypted etc. but without affecting end users who are just activating Office. Anyone figured this bit out yet? Student devices: This is the tough one and where I'm finding it almost impossible to defend Windows 10 right now. These devices can't be 1:1 model as we have too many students for it to be feasible (FE college) so they need to work in a hot desk fashion, quick login and ease of management essential. They'd live inside the college pretty much all the time so joining to internal AD DS makes more sense in this case. ADFS would provide SSO to cloud services. Problems here are all specific to Windows 10 and really drag it down compared to its direct competition in this space (Chromebooks) slow login (due to provisioning of unwanted Modern apps \ large profile) clunky management e.g. broken Start Menu, Edge etc. still some element of doubt over which edition to deploy (Education \ LTSB) major build updates on non-LTSB version It seems some on here have found workarounds for removing the default apps but I just find it bizarre that Enterprise \ Education versions of an OS contain so much consumer-level junk - how many hours have been wasted on the Start Menu and default apps alone I wonder? The only reason I've not gone further with the Google side yet is the potential confusion of deciding where data lives if we run both products concurrently without giving any clear guidance to go down one path or the other, but at the same time that seems to be the way forward until the basics work better on 10. We've been on Office 365 for a couple of years now so I'd rather make use of what we have right now but as it stands getting a user onto a Chromebook via GAfE is so much slicker it's hard to argue against. Does anyone else have similar issues?

By pure fluke the USB NICs we bought to use with Intel Compute Sticks will boot Venue 11 Pro devices via PXE Deployed our first Windows 10 image on it using our new MDT setup on Friday, just inject the drivers for this little beast and away you go... USB to Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter | Network Adapters Cards | StarTech.com United Kingdom

No mandatory profiles on our machines. The Win 10 devices are mainly for staff right now so literally just creating a new local profile with domain login.