News

Microsoft Releases Windows 10 Upgrade Tool as Preview

• By Kurt Mackie
• July 25, 2016

A new Microsoft upgrade-planning tool called "Upgrade Analytics" has been released to public preview, promising support for organizations considering a move to Windows 10.

Microsoft announced the preview of the new service last week in a new Microsoft Upgrade Analytics blog. Details on getting the preview subsequently were posted late on Friday in this second blog post.

The Upgrade Analytics service is part of the Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), which is a collection of services for managing public datacenter operations, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. OMS works with System Center, but also can be purchased separately, according to Microsoft's OMS pricing page.

The Upgrade Analytics tool is specifically designed to address the uncertainties of the "application and driver ecosystem" when moving to Windows 10, Klimaschewski explained. Here's the information that the Upgrade Analytics service delivers:

• Up-to date application and driver inventory, including usage data
• Information about known application and driver issues as well as guidance on how to mitigate them
• A way to track whether an application or driver is ready Windows 10 in your organization
• Per-Computer readiness information which you use to target computers for Windows 10 deployments

Upgrade Analytics uses "telemetry" to estimate application readiness. It categorizes the use of applications in an organization into "low install count," "not reviewed," "business critical," "important," and "review in progress" categories, according to this screenshot:

The Upgrade Analytics tool also lists how many computers are "OK to pilot" for Windows 10 upgrades. It shows a count of the computers that will get upgraded drivers at the time of the Windows 10 upgrade and those PCs that will need new drivers installed.

Microsoft has published some Upgrade Analytics documentation, which can be found at this this TechNet library page.