Five-week project is a big success story, says Microsoft.
Microsoft has provided details of its own internal Windows 11 rollout to 190,000 PCs worldwide in just five weeks that began on October 7,2021. While hailing its own global Windows 11 deployment as a big success, even Microsoft didn’t manage to upgrade all of its PCs to Windows 11. The new operating system has stringent minimum hardware requirements, which, for example, require Trusted Platform Module 2.0 chipsets that aren’t present in older PCs. “Windows 11 has specific hardware requirements, and a percentage of our devices were not upgraded. The employees with these devices will continue to run Windows 10 in parallel and get a Windows 11 device at their next device refresh,” said Microsoft’s Lukas Velush in a blog post. SEE: Windows 11: Latest updates bring a wave of new features Microsoft used its own tools to support the internal upgrade, including the Azure Update Compliance service combined with Microsoft Endpoint Manager’s Endpoint analytics feature to identify devices that do and don’t meet the minimum specifications. Microsoft doesn’t say what percentage of its devices didn’t meet the minimum requirements but states that “190,000 devices were deemed eligible based on hardware and role requirements”. Of those that did meet the minimum, the rollout was overwhelmingly a success. “Microsoft’s upgrade to Windows 11 is largely considered the smoothest we’ve ever had,” the company says in a blogpost.
