It’s only Day 2 of VMworld 2020 and while completely remote this year, it is as busy as ever. Yesterday, Shankar Iyer and Shawn Bass, end-user computing (EUC) general manager and CTO, respectively, made many new and exciting announcements at this year’s EUC keynote at VMworld 2020. In addition, DeskCon provided in-depth information about making the move to Windows 10 modern management. We even heard directly from some of our Workspace ONE customers to hear how they moved to cloud-native modern management in a two-part customer panel at DeskCon.
Modern management for Windows 10 has been a hot topic in the digital workspace track of VMworld this week. We continue to innovate in every area and customers have a truly comprehensive solution to manage, secure, and support Windows 10 PCs alongside their other endpoints and OS. From deployment and configuration to software management and delivery to employee support and experience, organizations have an end-to-end solution with VMware Workspace ONE for Windows 10 modern management. Here, we’ve compiled all the key announcements for Windows 10 modern management with Workspace ONE.
#1 in Enterprise PC Management
We have seen significant growth in managing Windows 10 devices. From June 2019 to 2020, we have more than doubled our Windows 10 device deployments – all of which are using modern management. And we have customers with well over 100,000 Windows 10 devices fully managed from Workspace ONE with cloud-native management capabilities across industries.
We are proud to announce that we ranked #1 in enterprise PC management by Gartner in their Critical Capabilities for UEM Tools report this year. In fact, VMware scored the highest in three out of four use cases, including enterprise PC management, compliance-driven management and role-based device management (read the full report here).
Expanding PC Deployment Capabilities to All Three Top OEM Providers
The first requirement to equip and enable a future ready – and a truly anywhere – workforce is to get devices and required software to employees, regardless where they are located. We have provided drop-ship provisioning capabilities in partnership with Dell in the past. Now, we have expanded our provisioning partnerships to include HP and Lenovo, in addition to our support for Dell. With all three original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), organizations can take advantage of zero-touch provisioning where PCs are prepared in the factory and shipped directly to an employee from the factory.
This PC deployment eliminates the need for IT teams to configure a device manually and allows employees to receive their PC and start working minutes after they power the device on for the first time. This functionality is particularly important currently as many employees and IT teams are not in corporate offices so traditional imaging and similar deployments can require even more steps, like additional shipping, therefore becoming a higher-touch process. We are excited to be able to expand this experience to more people who need it.
Consistent User Experiences with BYOD and Third-Party Managed Windows Devices
With increasingly more people working from home, employees are choosing to use their personally-owned devices to get work done as well. Not only company-provided devices need to be managed if they are to have access to company apps and data. Both types of devices need to provide ready-to-work experiences if employees are to use them, be productive and have a positive employee experience.
After employees have their Windows 10 PCs, they need access to the applications required to do their jobs. Employees had access to Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub to access their apps on corporate-owned Windows 10 PCs managed with Workspace ONE UEM. Now, we are bringing this same native Intelligent Hub experience to any Windows 10 device – regardless of whether the PC is UEM managed, BYO/unmanaged or managed by a third-party.
With this expansion to any Windows 10 device, employees have the most comprehensive digital workspace at their fingertips and can take advantage of all the great capabilities that Workspace ONE already has – such as a single location to access all their apps, per-app VPN for corporate apps, SSO, remote support, corporate communications and more all in one place – without restrictions around what is managing the device or whether the device is managed at all (BYOD) while still ensuring company apps and data are secure.
Faster, Streamlined Software Delivery with Enterprise App Repository
Delivering Windows applications are time-consuming – two-thirds of IT effort is spent getting these apps ready for the user by packaging and testing these applications. The remaining IT effort is spent keeping these apps up-to-date or patched. An average enterprise has thousands of apps, but because it is difficult to stay abreast of new patches and configuration and packaging of app patches are time-consuming and manual, less than 50 of them are patched regularly. To add more complexity, organizations often have multiple solutions or tools to patch all their applications with little to no integration to their mobile device management (MDM) solutions.
What if there was one place that IT could source all their commonly used apps, where they were sure that apps would “just work” and the latest versions were available to deploy?
Workspace ONE has now introduced a new Enterprise App Repository built for admins that serves as a one-stop-shop for hundreds of commonly used apps. The apps are prepackaged and preconfigured so IT can instantly deploy them to end-users’ Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub app catalog. The apps are kept up-to-date and pretested across the last three OS builds, ensuring a guaranteed installation. Not only are the apps kept up-to-date from the Enterprise App Catalog, but you can also sear the catalog for updated versions of these apps and update your current apps with those versions. Now, IT can spend less time packaging and testing apps and more time delivering services that provide an exceptional employee experience. Learn more here.
Powerful Automation with Workspace ONE Freestyle Orchestrator
Robotic process automation (RPA) – which takes activities that are manual, rule-based, and repetitive and automates them – is a hot topic for software. When it comes to modernizing IT, including modernizing endpoint management, organizations are looking for simplified engagement, automation and orchestration with many other third-party platforms.
Workspace ONE has lots of capabilities and functionality to speed up and simplify Windows 10 device management, such as smart groups, workflows, baselines and more. Without all these tools, it could take weeks to enroll and configure a profile. What if we could take these great capabilities one step further and use the ideas around robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline and automate enterprise operations for modern Windows 10 management like application deployment?
Well, now you can! We are excited to announce that users have these capabilities with Workspace ONE Freestyle Orchestrator. Freestyle Orchestrator provides an entirely new way to interact with the IT ecosystem with a new, low-code IT orchestrator platform. Admins quickly define app sequences, dependencies and more by pulling in resources like apps, profiles, scripts, policies and conditions – all within an intuitive drag and drop UI.
From onboarding to configuration to app management, Workspace ONE Freestyle Orchestrator provides limitless possibilities to streamline and modernize Windows 10 management. Freestyle Orchestrator is going into Tech Preview in UEM with support available for Windows 10 and macOS. But this incredibly powerful feature will soon be expanded to include mobile devices and Linux support and will also be integrated into the full Workspace ONE ecosystem, as well as third-party systems, so that organizations can take advantage of not just Windows 10 modern management, but also modern IT. An additional blog that goes into even more detail will be posted later this week, so stay tuned!
Even More Windows 10 Remote Support with Workspace ONE Assist
Workspace ONE Assist allows you to access, control, support and troubleshoot devices remotely. With Workspace ONE Assist, organizations can remotely access and control employee devices directly from the Workspace ONE console to quickly address device issues in real-time, enabling support reps to even restore a failed OS without physical access to the device.
We are pleased to announce that Workspace ONE Assist now also supports BYO or unmanaged Windows 10 devices, as well as unattended Windows 10 devices. With BYO/unmanaged Windows 10 devices, support reps have all the same capabilities as with corporate-owned/managed Windows 10 devices. Just as with managed devices, employees are notified of this remote access and approve it with a one-time session password. Organizations can assist their employees with device, network or application issues and tasks, while providing their employees with the peace of mind and privacy they expect.
In the case of corporate-owned/mission-critical Windows 10 devices, like scanners, rugged devices and medical workstations, organizations can now securely access and service them between shifts or overnight without the need of an employee on the other side of the device.
Optimized Employee Experience with Analytics from Workspace ONE Intelligence
Digital Employee Experience Management (DEEM) delivers user experience analytics and insights, enabling IT teams to measure and improve employee experience across the digital workspace. Now we are previewing an employee experience score that consolidates performance and engagement metrics across users, all device types (mobile and laptop/desktops) and apps (beyond only Office 365 apps). Within Workspace ONE Intelligence, IT now has an expanded set of monitoring, analytics and automation capabilities. Now, IT teams will have access to new dashboards that show employee experience trends over time, device health, boot and shutdown performance, troublesome apps and more.
As just a couple examples of the many uses of this powerful tool, IT can use DEEM to identify devices with long PC boot or shutdown times, conduct root cause analyses, then take the appropriate corrective actions. It can also be used to identify poorly performing applications by tracking app errors, crashes, and hangs as well as monitor app network performance metrics so that IT teams are positioned to address employee issues before they become a problem. These additional capabilities empower IT to take proactive actions to remediate issues, reduce resolution time, and improve the overall employee experience.
Experience It Yourself
More and more customers are using Workspace ONE to deploy, manage and secure their Windows 10 devices to their employees during this unprecedented year. This way, they are setting themselves up to be future ready and can respond faster to changes with modern management.
This year at VMworld 2020, there’s a special event called DeskCon to help you make the move to modern management for all your Windows 10 devices. If you haven’t had a chance to see our talks around Windows 10 modern management this year, be sure to check it out here.
To learn more about all of the Digital Workspace news at VMworld 2020, head over to our keynote recap blog: VMworld 2020: All of our EUC announcements, themes, and everything else you need to know.
