News You can Use: March 2021

This newsletter contains a few items of interest that have caught my eye in the Modern EUC and Workforce Transformation space in the last week or so.

This month’s highlighted items:

• At least 30,000 organizations across the United States — including a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments – have reported hacks.  The hack is from a  previously unidentified Chinese hacking crew it dubbed “Hafnium”  and it affect mostly on-prem Exchange environment.      Although patches have been applied, many organizations do not know if they have been hacked.      More info here

• As mentioned in previous newsletter, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge are no longer  supported by Microsoft.   As some of you pointed out, after 20 years of service Adobe ended Flash support on December 31. 2020 as well.      This has been known for a long time, but for some organizations this has caused challenges, as it actually stopped working on January 2021 by blocking content.     

• Microsoft’s Windows 10 security patch from January 12, 2021 included a Secure Boot update that triggered a Bitlocker key recovery leaving causing many end-users to call their help desks, which in many cases were not prepared to handle incident and volume.   More info here

• Microsoft announced two new versions of Office: Office 2021 and Microsoft Office LTSC –    The interesting part of this announcement is, the acknowledgement of Microsoft that many business customers still have use cases and specific scenarios that prevent them from moving to cloud-ready Enterprise 365 Apps (formerly known as Office 365)     More on this on ModernEUC blog post

• Using Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) still?  Moving (or moved) to Modern Device Management?   You should considered using Windows Update for Business (WUfB) instead.   Many options and capabilities made for cloud based management  check out this blog post for more
• Although shipping fully configured to the end-user is not a new thing, we are pretty excited at work as we launched an evolution of our existing to help customers who have adopted modern device management  tools, deploy device faster and already configured.     The new service is called Dell Connected Provisioning and can be used with Microsoft Intune and VMware Workspace One Unified Endpoint Management (UEM ) platforms.    
  • Connected Provisioning: Making Zero IT Touch Provisioning A Breeze
  • Check out Dell’s Connected Provisioning page for more info
    
    
• Windows Virtual Desktop  continues to evolve and is becoming much more accepted as a virtual desktop environment for organizations large and small.   Many have been using it as the best alternative (the only one supported by Microsoft)  to keep running Windows 7 legacy systems.   Lots more  on this on this Modern EUC Blog post
  

Dell Technologies End-User Education Services helping with Microsoft Teams Adoption

Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork within Office 365. To accelerate the adoption of new products and ways of working remotely, Dell Technologies Education Services provides an end-user training portal with short intuitive and practical how to videos they can use.   Checkout the video and data sheet on our website

• For a bit deeper dive into the technical side:
  • Many organizations use Citrix to delivery productivity and core apps to their users.    Running Microsoft 365 Enterprise Apps within this environment can be challenging.      In a tip I heard from the great EUC centric 5BytesPodcast, Rory Monaghan mentioned a blog post on How to Run Microsoft Teams inside Citrix. 
    • I learned a lot from reading it! –  Good share!   Thanks Rory!

More Modern Device Management resources can be found at:

• Dell’s InFocus Workforce Transformation Series
• Modern EUC Blog (Twitter @moderneuc)
• Modern Deployment Blog by Nathan Bridges

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Disclaimer: Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer. Information is made  available for educational, recreational, marketing and informational purposes only and is provided as-is with no explicit or implied warranties. ModernEUC.com is not associated, endorsed or sponsored by Dell Technologies.

You can also check out the archive of past newsletters here

If you have any articles you want me to consider including in future blog posts just ping me on Twitter: @moderneuc with some details!