{"id":8051,"date":"2024-01-22T09:00:46","date_gmt":"2024-01-22T17:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=8051"},"modified":"2024-01-22T09:42:40","modified_gmt":"2024-01-22T17:42:40","slug":"insights-you-can-use-microsofts-internal-upgrade-to-windows-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/insights-you-can-use-microsofts-internal-upgrade-to-windows-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Insights you can use: Microsoft\u2019s internal upgrade to Windows 11"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
Microsoft\u2019s upgrade to Windows 11 was the smoothest in company history. The Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team was able to upgrade 190,000 employee devices in just five weeks. And we learned a lot! Here are our key learnings to help with your own deployment journey.<\/p>\n
Why did we succeed?<\/p>\n
We divided our upgrade into three stages: plan, prepare, and deploy.<\/p>\n
First, we determined which devices could be upgraded. Windows 11 has specific hardware requirements<\/a>, and not all devices were eligible to be upgraded. Employees with these devices will continue to run Windows 10\u2014when their current PC is ready for an upgrade, they\u2019ll get a device that runs Windows 11. We used Update Compliance<\/a> and Microsoft Endpoint Manager\u2019s Endpoint analytics feature<\/a> to evaluate our device population. In total, 190,000 devices qualified for the upgrade, and 99 percent of upgrades were successful.<\/p>\n Knowing which devices were upgradable enabled us to create a clear timeline, helping our communications team to land the upgrade with our employees. We used a ring-based approach<\/a> to manage the upgrade, which allowed us to gradually release Windows 11 across the company.<\/p>\n Past upgrades didn\u2019t always go smoothly\u2014system crashes, blue screens, incompatible hardware all led to communications challenges as we tried to mitigate upgrade issues. But with Windows 11, knowing that upgrades were mostly smooth, we were able to focus our communications on building excitement. The goal? Make readiness content easily digestible for everyone. We used Yammer, FAQs, Microsoft SharePoint, email, Microsoft Teams, our internal homepage, and digital signage to reach employees. We drove interest by focusing on Windows’ new look and feel, exciting new features, and by assuring users that the upgrade would be fast\u2014and completed on their schedule.<\/p>\nPrepare readiness content<\/h2>\n