Windows 10 for Education Strategy Briefings

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Tonight our son Sam begins his college journey with thousands of other students at Northern Illinois University.  He is a freshman and as opposed to a crazy move in day today, he has been living in his dorm a whole week participating in marching band camp.  Tonight we can march with him over to NIU's Brigham stadium to celebrate the beginning of the school year.

This week I also began a series of Windows 10 for education strategy briefings.  These briefings are focused on how to get to Windows 10 deployed and guidance, best practices, challenges/successes, as well as tips and tricks in deploying on new or upgrading/reimaging existing equipment.  Here I will provide some of the links and useful information that comes out of these briefings.  This first post will include some great background links on planning your Windows 10 deployment.

aka.ms/edudeploy - great starting point if you are on the hook for planning or executing a deployment (or pilot)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/Compare - compare various editions

Windows 10 is the FIRST time Microsoft supports upgrading from the Professional edition to the Business editions (Enterprise or Education).  You can still upgrade from the Home edition to Professional, but there is no requirement to reinstall/reimage to get to Enterprise or Education editions.  We discuss in the briefings some reasons to upgrade and some situations where reimaging/starting from scratch makes more sense.

We also have discussed the fresh install without formatting option that backs up everything into a WINDOWS.OLD folder structure from your previous installed version of Windows.  That can be a supported or unsupported of Windows and then allows you to copy back any data an instructor, staff or student may have had on the device.

The repartitioning of drives came up yesterday in Houston as another potential pilot approach - shrink your hard drive partition so that you can dual boot current OS and Windows 10 OS (contingency in case of an issue or something not working?  Reboot into old operating system).  More tips, feedback and guidance will be posted over time, but this should get you started with some homework.

Welcome back Educators!