With the worldwide pandemic, prospects are counting on distant work greater than ever, and Home windows Digital Desktop helps prospects quickly ship a safe Home windows 10 desktop expertise to their customers. Charlie Anderson, CIO of Fife Council in the UK, was planning to modernize his firms’ present Distant Destop Providers (RDS) infrastructure, after which enterprise necessities modified. He wanted elevated agility and scale to fulfill the altering necessities. In his personal phrases:
“Home windows Digital Desktop was completely important for us when it comes to our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many, we had been confronted with a continuity difficulty unparalleled in current instances. For us, this meant not solely the continuation of companies we already delivered, but additionally responding in a short time to new calls for arising on account of our public response to the pandemic.
To try this, we would have liked to supply as near the “in-office” expertise as we may to a workforce now working away from our workplaces. This meant multiplying earlier distant working capacities by an element of 15 nearly in a single day – one thing which might have been unimaginable and not using a scalable and cloud-based method, which additionally labored effectively on a variety of Council and self-provided units.
There’s little doubt that the Home windows Digital Desktop resolution is not going to solely be important to the long run resilience of our public companies to the individuals of Fife, however it can additionally kind a key a part of our future gadget technique as we search to develop new, agile, and cost-effective approaches going ahead.“
In April 2020, we launched the general public preview of Azure portal integration which made it simpler to deploy and handle Home windows Digital Desktop. We additionally introduced a brand new audio/video redirection (A/V redirect) functionality that supplied seamless assembly and collaboration expertise for Microsoft Groups. We’re humbled by the wonderful suggestions we’ve acquired from you on these capabilities, and that’s been an enormous motivation for our group to speed up improvement. We’re joyful to announce that each the Azure portal integration and A/V redirect in Microsoft Groups are actually usually obtainable.
Azure portal integration
With the Azure portal integration, you get a easy interface to deploy and handle your apps and digital desktops. Host pool, workspace, and all different objects you create are Azure Useful resource Supervisor objects and are managed the identical manner you handle different Azure assets.
Clients who’ve present deployments based mostly on the earlier (basic) mannequin can proceed utilizing it. We’ll quickly publish steerage on migrating to the brand new Azure Useful resource Supervisor-based deployment mannequin so you may benefit from all the brand new capabilities, together with:
Azure role-based entry management (RBAC)
You need to use Azure RBAC to supply fine-grained entry management to your Home windows Digital Desktop assets. There are 4 built-in admin roles that you could get began with, and you’ll create customized roles if crucial.
Consumer administration
Beforehand, you possibly can solely publish Distant Apps and Desktops to particular person customers. Now you can publish assets to Azure Energetic Listing (Azure AD) teams, which makes it a lot simpler to scale.
Monitoring
The monitoring logs are actually saved in Azure Monitor Logs. You may analyze the logs with Log Analytics and create visualizations that will help you shortly troubleshoot points.
A/V redirect for Microsoft Groups
Lots of you employ Microsoft Groups to collaborate along with your colleagues. Historically, digital desktops haven’t been ideally suited for audio and video conferencing as a consequence of latency points. That modifications with the brand new A/V redirect function in Home windows Digital Desktop. When you allow A/V redirect within the Desktop shopper for Home windows, the audio and video might be dealt with domestically for Microsoft Groups calls and conferences. You may nonetheless use Microsoft Groups on Home windows Digital Desktop with different shoppers with out optimized calling and conferences. Microsoft Groups chat and collaboration options are supported on all platforms.
Subsequent steps
You may learn extra about these updates within the Azure portal integration and Microsoft Groups integration documentation pages.
Thanks to your help in the course of the preview. If in case you have any questions, please attain out to us on Tech Neighborhood and UserVoice.
