Windows 11 was released on October 5th after a public preview phase when everybody was already able to install and have a look at it. Now the time has come for the final version. I show you how you can enroll it with Endpoint Manager to your client PCs.
In a previous post, I’ve shown you, how to install the Windows 11 insider release build on corporate computers using Endpoint Manager. Now that the final version is here, there is no more need to install a beta, use the final one! Using Endpoint Manager, you can deploy Windows 11 either to your productive PCs or to some test machines – it is up to you. I deploy it to my Windows 365 Business CloudPC to perform some tests before I install it on my productive PC.
To fulfill the steps I show you here, you need:
- a target user or device that will be the happy one to recveive the update
- Intune license assigned for that user
- a test client (or Windows 365 like I do it in this article) (read the hardware requirements first)
- a web browser to access the admin portals 😉
So open your webbrowser (you should use Google Chrome or the modern Microsoft Edge) and open https://endpoint.microsoft.com. Remember that in the preview you had to deploy the update to Windows 11 as an update? Now in the meantime, the Windows 11 update is categorized as major update like Windows 10 21H1, so there is a special policy that needs to be set. Go to Devices > Windows > Feature Updates for Windows 10 and later (preview) and create a policy for Windows 11:
The content of the policy is really very easy and doesn’t need much explanation:
Last but not least, you need to assign the feature update policy to the users or PCs. I work with device groups. Because this is an update for testing, I work with assignments and not dynamic groups. For production a group with dynamic device membership makes sense:
In the official article from Microsoft there are 2 other interesting hints:
- in future, Endpoint Manager will allow to schedule the update to Windows 11
- in future, Endpoint Manager will allow the update with Update rings (like it was with the preview)
So, only some minutes after the new Endpoint Manager setting, I already saw new updates on my laptop (after installing another intermediate update:
Wonderful – the long awaited update is here ❤
Of course I could not wait to install Windows 11 – and round about 20 minutes later it was finally there: Windows 11 Enterprise. All my setting were taken, my apps remain installed and all is functionally – as far as I can tell after a short 2-minute look (jepp, I play Diablo 2 and the first look was if the Battle.net installer works after the upgrade 🙂 ):
You see the task bar? All Edge settings and profiles are like in Windows 10 – everything is fine. Now I am looking forward to working with Windows 11. The next thing I will try out soon is the Teams performance – that was not good in the Insider Preview (video was very bad quality and stuck, so was desktop sharing).
One thing that I see very fast is that Microsoft fixed the bug about Windows auto-upgrade to Enterprise. That did not happen in the insider build:
I am happy 🙂
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