Last week, I introduced our Evergreen IT Process Framework which introduced a generalized framework of processes that can be applied to any Evergreen IT use case, whether it is a hardware refresh, an application lifecycle management, a VDI migration, or any other project. Many of you found the blog post useful. To make it even more actionable for you, I wanted to share with you some ideas on how to build an optimized tool stack around this process framework. 

If you have read any of our content before, you know that having a repeatable, industrialized process is the very foundation for Evergreen IT Management success. By now, most organizations have dipped their toes into Evergreen IT by creating such a process for Windows 10 Servicing, and after more than five years since the release of the first Windows 10 version, the vast majority of organizations should have a good idea of what the process should look like or better, have a formalized process in place.

Desktop Analytics is a toolset that is gaining traction in the enterprise space with organizations looking to leverage compatibility, performance and health data to drive their ongoing Windows 10 management. We are really exited about how we can action Desktop Analytics insight within our Dashworks platform, so we thought it was an opportune moment to update on some real world experience of the new Microsoft tooling.

One of our larger customers recently installed Desktop Analytics to use it as a source of supplemental data to manage their Windows 7 and Windows 10 1803 migration to Windows 10 1909. It is a large customer (>10,000 seats) with a significant number of applications.

Co-ordinating the testing of hundreds or thousands of enterprise applications against a new operating system or patch release has long been the bane of many an application manager's life. But now there is a new approach. Smoke testing can provide a quick, inexpensive, and minimally disruptive way to run your applications through an automated test, verifying that the most essential (or core) functionalities are working as expected. Successfully implemented, it is a crucial part of your Evergreen IT strategy.

While the core principles and outcomes of smoke testing in the Evergreen IT context remain the same as with your initial OS image build testing, it is worth walking through the fundamentals of smoke testing as it pertains to your Evergreen IT strategy. I will also outline the resulting benefits, the required steps, and best practices to perform some testing as part of Evergreen IT Management.

Instinctively, we all know that keeping our IT environment up-to-date is a good thing. Yet, despite the fact that the enterprise market is, by now, over the peak of initial Windows 10 migrations, many organizations still haven't found a good upgrade rhythm for the ongoing updates.

We call this perpetual updating of assets 'Evergreen IT'. Oftentimes, traditional migration teams handed things over to their Business-as-Usual counterparts once the initial migration was completed without having established Evergreen IT methodologies or processes in place to properly maintain the environment. Therefore, it often falls on the BAU team to not only create scalable, repeatable, and industrialized processes, but also sell Evergreen IT Management principles to their internal customers after-the-fact.

If you are in that position, we would like to make that sales job easier for you. To help, we have compiled a list of the most significant Evergreen IT Management advantages that your boss and your internal customers will want to hear about!

While Windows 10 was touted initially as the fastest adopted OS in Microsoft history and Gartner predicted that 80% of enterprises would have completed or at least started their migration by the end of 2018, Windows 10 reached more than 50 percent market share in August 2019 — more than four years after its initial release! 

As of January 14th, 2020, Windows 7 is officially dead. While you can buy extended support until 2023, every month you are not moving to Windows 10 is going to cost you dearly. In addition to the pricey ESU fees, you are exposing your environment to security vulnerabilities that can result in costly data breaches, malware attacks, or other problems. Your employee technology experience will decline, resulting in lower talent retention rates as well as productivity loss. And the list goes on. The point is, enterprises simply cannot afford to not upgrade as quickly as possible. 

On May 30 and July 2, Juriba's CTO, Barry Angell, presented a session entitled 'How to get your executive management fired up about Evergreen IT after your Windows 10 migration' at the Ivanti Windows 10 Summit. The conference was hosted entirely online and it is still available to watch on-demand.

A few weeks ago, I participated in two interesting sessions at the Microsoft Ignite Tour: one about Microsoft Autopilot, which we have extensively covered in the past, and one about Desktop Analytics, which is the forthcoming upgrade to Microsoft's Windows Analytics telemetry tool. With the release due shortly, we thought we would share some information on this significant update.

Last month, we partnered with Flexera to present the webinar entitled "Time is up for Windows 7: How to position your organization for Windows 10 and beyond" hosted by myself and Adam Jeffries, Senior Solution Engineer at Flexera.

We all know that hindsight is always 20/20. There is probably nothing more frustrating than realizing that you just made a huge mistake, and then looking back and realizing that you should have known that that was a bad idea. But sometimes, we also receive really bad advice that overrides our gut feeling or better judgement.

Whatever caused the misstep, we all learn from mistakes — but it's always easier to learn through someone else's mistakes. So, we compiled below the worst pieces of advice we have ever heard on the topic of managing an effective IT Transformation. This way, if you hear one of these common myths, you'll know to be wary of it and consider it twice.

Office 365, Microsoft's SaaS version of its Office Suite, has grown even more popular in recent months. Organizations, especially those that have already moved over to Windows 10, are starting or planning to adopt Office 365 across their IT environment. The move to Office 365 also needs to go fast for enterprises that are still running Office 2010, as that product goes end-of-life in October, and there will be no extended support from Microsoft.

Taking the above into consideration, many businesses have turned to Microsoft's Readiness Toolkit for Office add-ins and VBA (hereafter referred to as Readiness Toolkit) to help prepare for the migration. This post will take a closer look at what the Readiness Toolkit is, what it can and can't do, and how to maximize its potential.

Over the past few years, we have seen our fair share of failed and dangerously inefficient enterprise attempts to keep Windows 10 and Office 365 Servicing up-to-date. Often, the organization took longer than anticipated to run through the first initial migration, skipped an update to come up for air, just to drown under the workload of the feature update roll out, for which it had vastly underestimated the risk and work effort. Ever worse, these updates are often managed manually, with antiquated and inadequate project management practices!

If you recently tried to find anything on Microsoft Office — for example on the enterprise section of Office.com — you might have noticed that there isn't much mention of Microsoft's on-premise productivity application suite anymore.

The vast majority of Microsoft's marketing communication and sales conversation is about Office 365! This is not an oversight or a temporary marketing campaign — but rather a strategic push to move enterprise customers away from the perpetually licensed Office fat client and onto the subscription-based, always up-to-date Office 365. Moreover, now that Office 2019 is about to be released, many enterprises are asking themselves: "Should we consider Office 2019, or is it not the right time to switch to Office 365 ProPlus?"

Rolling out Office 365 can be very exciting considering the value it will add to your organization in terms of unified communication, collaboration, and business processes! But it can be equally terrifying if you think about all the dependencies of users, mailboxes, delegates, mail archives, public folders, groups, instant messaging, ... the list goes on and on.

After the initial migration is completed, Microsoft will release two larger Office client feature updates and monthly security updates to increase productivity for your end users and tighten security. However, just like Windows as a Service, these larger feature updates will need to be rolled out effectively as they can also be considered a mini-migration.

Last week, we spoke about how to negotiate a successful Windows 10 or Office 365 migration deal with a service integrator. But what happens once the contracts are signed? Should you sit back and let them take the reigns completely or is there something you can do to ensure the success of this project?

Some enterprises assume that because they just hired an expert organization to take this project off their hands, they can simply drop the ball and let the integrator pick it up and run with it. But while your outsourcer brings a tremendous value to the table, it is completely unrealistic to expect that they will do the best job possible without associated input from your side.

LONDON, 3 July 2019 -- Juriba has announced that its flagship software Dashworks has been accepted into the G-Cloud 11 framework, part of the UK Government’s digital marketplace.

It's been a long time coming, but it is finally here — our brand-new Windows-as-a-Service Management Project Plan Template! And I am thrilled to finally share with you some details on it.

This brand-new project plan template is the sequel to our extremely successful Windows 10 Enterprise Migration Project Plan that was originally published in September of 2015. While the previous project plan focused on the initial migration to Microsoft's new operating system, this new project plan enables technology executives, IT pros, and BAU managers to plan and execute their ongoing Windows-as-a-Service update management in the most effective way possible.

LONDON, 2 July 2018 -- Juriba has announced that its flagship software Dashworks has been accepted into the G-Cloud 10 framework, part of the UK Government’s digital marketplace.

If you look at how IT traditionally spent its investment dollars, there would be a distinct requirement for a positive return on investment by the end of the first three years. Many were long-term IT investments that would determine how you would operate in the next ten to twelve years, and resulted in the definition of many established IT management practices.

But those ancient IT processes and policies used to manage legacy apps are inadequate to handle modern technology updates. Today, most enterprises are much more agile, having moved applications into the cloud, or utilizing the power of Software-as-a-Service. However, most are still maintaining a layer of dinosaur legacy applications and other mission-critical on-premise software in massive data centers. Since most IT organizations are unable or unwilling to change how they manage IT, they still use IT processes and policies that date back more than twenty years!

The quality of customer service has a massive impact on how consumers interact with the service provider — whether that provider is an internal department, an outsource partner, or a company providing goods and services externally. Studies have shown that one out of two customers will stop doing business with a company because of a poor service experience.

That is why most consumers, 71% in fact, prefer firms that give them the ability to solve most service issues on their own. While this might not surprise you, it might shock you to know that an astonishing 38% of consumers would rather clean a toilet than speak to a customer service representative!

In the last few years, enterprise IT departments have faced a unique set of challenges: On the one hand, they have morphed from a supporting entity to a business enabler, and are maintaining increasingly complex IT landscapes whilst battling significantly larger cyber security threats than ever before. On the other hand, they have to manage more change with fewer resources and stagnant or minimally-increasing budgets.

A few weeks ago, we spoke about the Digital Workplace and how it came a long way from being an abstract concept that a lot of companies saw value in, but did not have the technology to support their needs properly, to becoming a reality for a lot of enterprises as they embraced server-hosted virtual desktops.

As organizations are now embarking on their Windows 10 migrations, as well as considering Evergreen IT as a long-term IT goal in order to become more agile, scalable and flexible, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is experiencing a technology-induced revival. It's been a much slower adoption than many analysts expected, but more companies are now virtualizing desktops than ever before!

Gartner expected the hosted virtual desktop market to grow to 76 million users by the end of this year. And it seems the growth is not slowing down anytime soon. Most analysts forecast anywhere from 8.9% CAGR (IDC for the entire VCC market) up to 27% (depending on the analysts' definition of VDI) during the period 2016-2020. 

As more and more enterprises are starting to embrace Virtual Desktop Infrastructure to save costs, tighten security and improve manageability and compliance as well as give their employees more device flexibility and accessibility options, many fail to consider the generational change in the workforce that is happening right now. 

Microsoft has been buzzing this week with announcements around the future of its Windows 10 Servicing model — so much that one announcement almost fell through the cracks: the public preview release of the software giant's cloud-connected service Desktop Analytics.

Originally announced with much fanfare in September 2018, Desktop Analytics was described as a cloud service that integrates with System Center Configuration Manager and is aimed to make application compatibility assessment before a Windows 10 or Office 365 upgrade/migration easier. In addition, the free tool was supposed to provide migration suggestions, help create optimized pilot groups for testing, and allow IT managers to create quick inventories of in-house Windows apps to make compatibility checks simpler. Or, in Microsoft's words, it would "take the guess work out of testing and focus your attention on key blockers."

Traditionally, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is performed at the end of a long software development cycle by the intended audience under real-world conditions. By then, engineering has performed a battery of technical tests to ensure the software works as expected. However, in some cases, engineering's understanding of the business requirements and user needs versus what the user was actually looking for are two very different things. This is where UAT usually comes in.

Today, we are wrapping up our 3-part blog post series about Evergreen IT by taking a closer look at software catalogs.

(If you have missed the previous blog posts you can find them here: Software Asset Lifecycle Management - Dream or Reality as well as How Important Is Application Normalization For Your Next Windows 10 Migration And Evergreen IT?)

As your organization evolves, and demand for business flexibility increases, the proliferation of applications each end user works with tends to grow in volume as well. Consequently, your IT department works to cope with an increasingly complicated application environment, and you begin to dream of initiating a Software Asset Lifecycle Management project that will bring order to the chaos. 

What’s the name of that application Employee A is running on her desktop? Is it the same as the similar title running on another computer by Employee B in a nearby department? You cannot get an accurate idea of how much software you have deployed if you don’t know the names and locations of each installed application.

If software is not named consistently, you might see one copy that includes the name of the vendor and another that has a truncated or abbreviated version of the same name, or a different vendor entirely (think Macromedia and Adobe - both now Adobe Systems). It might seem like you have five applications when actually you only have five names for the same thing.

A stressed out, harried IT department is a sign that your organization has bitten off more than it can chew. There’s no need to have circumstances lead to the point where your IT professionals are pulling out their hair in frustration and growing ragged from lack of sleep because of the burden that comes from launching one big bang project after the other.

Instead, gradual, incremental changes to your mission-critical software assets will be much more effective and will help your organization stay on track. Many larger organizations have recognized this not only as a possible way to gain a long-term competitive advantage but also a way to significantly cut cost and resources. 

In this 3-part series, we are exploring vital stepping stones that pave the way to achieving this. Last week, we talked about software asset lifecycle management, and today we will look into application normalization. In a few days, we will take a closer look at software cataloging. With that in mind, you may be wondering how important application normalization is to your Windows 10 and Evergreen IT projects.

Today, enterprises need to be able to adapt faster to changing environments to fend off competitive pressure; they need to be able to grow faster or scale back when needed — all while reducing costs and increasing the value of the services offered.

There is not a week that goes by where I don't have at least one conversation about Evergreen IT or managing IT change as "Business as Usual" with prospects, customers or partners. 

The demand for managing information technology assets on a continual basis reflects a natural consequence of software developments (e.g., cloud computing, software-as-a-service) as well as changing business demands. Think about your Apple or Android phone constantly updating applications in the background, or Windows 10 and its regular patches.

But back in the corporate world, the requirement for control of the environment is a significant hurdle to adopting the most adaptive change methodologies. Imagine if an untested change brought down your main trading application! The challenge is how to take a better approach but retain control. Ideally, Evergreen IT results in increased efficiencies, more agility and better scalability across the entire enterprise. For example, IT transformations could be managed in an agile fashion (business as usual), rather than in one-off big bang migration projects. 

 With the Windows 2003 Server end of life time bomb now passed on July 14^th 2015, we thought we would take the time to document our advice for Server 2003 migration project planning activities based on our own server migration experience. Download our Server 2003 Project Plan for free.

Last week, I introduced our Evergreen IT Process Framework which introduced a generalized framework of processes that can be applied to any Evergreen IT use case, whether it is a hardware refresh, an application lifecycle management, a VDI migration, or any other project. Many of you found the blog post useful. To make it even more actionable for you, I wanted to share with you some ideas on how to build an optimized tool stack around this process framework. 

Juriba is delighted to announce that BGF (@BGFinvestments), the UK and Ireland’s most active investor in growth businesses, has decided to invest in the company to fuel accelerated product development and drive international scale.

Juriba was created in 2008 and is led by Barry Angell, Julia Bell and Iain Fraser, The company is a fast-growth technology business that specializes in digital transformation software, providing innovative solutions for medium-sized to large corporations and multinational organisations,

A few weeks ago, we walked through a detailed cost calculation of running an Evergreen IT-managed Windows 10 upgrade cycle. We were able to demonstrate significant savings while stressing the point of needing dedicated resources and budget despite the common perception. We felt like we were only telling you half of the story, so here's the other half: the calculation changes when you add more Evergreen IT projects into the mix!

The thing is, Evergreen IT is like a flywheel. It spins faster if you apply force and slows down when you apply friction. By managing more Evergreen IT projects utilizing the same centralized management platform and standardized processes, you create velocity that spins your Evergreen IT process faster — resulting in significantly higher return-on-investment and potential savings.

Many times, after I give a demo, prospects get excited about the many different scenarios they can manage with Dashworks. All of a sudden, ideas come to life. "We could piggyback a hardware refresh onto our Windows 10 migration," or "We could roll out new, AppV-suitable applications while transitioning to VDI."

Then the excitement usually gets dampened by the same questions: "Does that require a different license? How will that change the overall investment?" Many of you are totally surprised to find out that you can manage all the different use case scenarios with one Dashworks license.

Today, I want to walk you through the different licensing options, show you which is best for each scenario, and most importantly, make you aware that you indeed can manage all the different scenarios with just one Dashworks license.

A few years back, a tech consultant won a few eBay auctions he was bidding on and found himself the owner of 2 tons of LEGO pieces overnight. He developed and built a GPU-based neural network to first pick out damaged and dirty pieces and then identify and sort the remaining pieces.

Sometimes, this situation reminds me of an estate before a Windows 10 upgrade. Each application is like a lego brick. Some are the same, some slightly different, some uncompliant and not wanted and some you want to group together and keep. In order to sort out the mess, you need to normalize, rationalize, and categorize all of your applications before you are able to group your users into the correct deployment rings. If you have hundreds of thousands of seats, this must happen at maximum velocity (in other words, based on the most efficient mathematical algorithm) in order to keep pace.

Juriba is delighted to announce that BGF (@BGFinvestments), the UK and Ireland’s most active investor in growth businesses, has decided to invest in the company to fuel accelerated product development and drive international scale.

Juriba was created in 2008 and is led by Barry Angell, Julia Bell and Iain Fraser, The company is a fast-growth technology business that specializes in digital transformation software, providing innovative solutions for medium-sized to large corporations and multinational organisations,

Global Workplace Analytics estimates that "56% of the U.S. workforce holds a job that is compatible (at least partially) with remote work", yet "only 3.6% of the employee workforce works at home half-time or more." There are many reasons for this. Many office-based employees enjoy the social aspect of being physically co-located and, for some younger employees, a hip workplace is a big plus when accepting a job offer. On the hiring side, managers fear losing control of their workforce and not being able to tell if people are slacking off. And, of course, there are the misconceptions from friends and family about whether or not you have a "proper" job.

At Juriba, we know how important it is to work with, and action accurate, up-to-date data during your IT transformation project or BAU change activity. This is why our product, Dashworks, uses read-only data connectors to import data sources such as user directories and organizational hierarchies, computer hardware and software inventory data, application compatibility data, and ITSM information from existing repositories within the organization. But it's not just about importing data. We often want to automate the actions required to automate a workflow such as creating a service request ticket. Today, I am thrilled that Juriba is announcing a new Dashworks Connector for ServiceNow.

At Juriba, we believe all our customers deserve access to valuable and free education on our products.

LONDON, 3 July 2019 -- Juriba has announced that its flagship software Dashworks has been accepted into the G-Cloud 11 framework, part of the UK Government’s digital marketplace.