Simon Townsend highlights the role of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management in easing the migration from Windows 10 to 11
When Channel 4 launched on November 2, 1982, the first programme it screened was Countdown, hosted by Richard Whiteley and Carol Vorderman. Forty- two years and over 8,000 episodes later, it’s still one of the most popular daytime game shows in Britain (holding a Guinness World Record for its longevity). Contestants race to do word-based and mathematical tasks before the Countdown clock ticks down to a climactic end (a tune written by the late Alan Hawkshaw, famous for also composing the music for Grange Hill and Cadbury’s Milk Tray adverts).
The clock is ticking in a similar fashion for organisations running Windows 10. In a little over a year’s time, on October 14, 2025, Microsoft will terminate Windows 10 support, meaning that security updates will no longer be provided to users. Yes, you can pay for Extended Support Updates (this is not designed to be a long-term solution) but it’s pricey at almost £50 per user in the first year, doubling in year 2 and again in year 3 to nearly £200 per desktop.
Doing nothing is not an option. If you’re not up-to-date with the latest security patches, you’ll potentially leave your organisation open to catastrophic vulnerabilities. You only need to remember what happened to the NHS in May 2017 when patient care was disrupted at around 80 Trusts and 595 GP surgeries due to the WannaCry malware attack. This exploited computers running legacy Windows XP, as well as those using unpatched Windows 7 software.
The latest OS transition is complicated by the fact that Microsoft has really homed in on security and upped the ante on the hardware needed, putting in place stringent requirements for Windows 11 to run. Not only are there minimum specifications in terms of RAM, disk space and CPU (you’ll need endpoints with a 64- bit processor), but devices require secure boot support and have to run a chip called TPM2.0 (Trusted Platform Module) – a secure crypto processor designed to carry out cryptographic operations.
Analysts Canalys estimate that 240 million PCs globally could become e-waste as they lack the right hardware to run Windows 11, pointing out that if these PCs were all folded laptops, stacked one on top of another, the pile would be 4,080km high.
A familiar problem
We’ve been here before. Windows was introduced nearly 40 years ago, in 1985, and has since undergone 10 or so significant updates, each one creating substantial work for IT departments.
Any migration – and it doesn’t matter what it is (Windows 10 to 11, VDI to DaaS or Windows to Mac) – is always costly, time consuming and complex. There’s planning, testing applications (so-called ‘smoke tests’), migrating everything, getting user feedback, followed by QA checking
to fix issues and training. This all needs to be done without causing downtime that could impact employee productivity and business as usual activities. It’s at least a year’s work for larger organisations.
The good news is the world has moved on considerably over the years and there are now comprehensive, feature-rich tools to help simplify the three main phases of any major OS migration – assessment, migration and optimisation – saving time, money and frustration.
1 Assessment
Before any Windows 11 installation can start, IT departments need to carefully assess the devices and software they’ve got, given that most organisations have heterogenous computing environments:
- How many devices are deployed and from which vendor(s)?
- What hardware are they running?
- Do they have the all-important TPM2.0 chip?
- Do they have enough disc space? nWhat’s the battery status and health?
- Do they have the right level of processor and RAM?
- What applications are people actually using day-to-day versus what’s been deployed?
- Are there enough licences for these applications?
- Are users having performance issues?
Historically, this was primarily a laborious manual process. Today, you can automate necessary analysis, using powerful desktop monitoring tools and – within minutes – collect detailed information about the devices, applications and performance of your estate. This accelerates the assessment phase such that informed decisions can be made quickly about what needs to happen regarding the migration.
Simply put, this helps customers understand what devices will run Windows 11, what devices could be repurposed and what devices need to be changed and bought net new. In addition, you get insight into the software employees use day-to-day and therefore what applications need to be tested to make sure they continue to work.
There’s also a strong argument that in any migration it’s good practice to review and consolidate applications in use. If a company has been paying an annual application licence fee for 1,000 people, but the analysis shows only 750 use the software, it’s an opportunity to scale down to save money.
2 Migration
To do the actual migration, Microsoft Intune or technologies from Avanti are typically used to push out the new OS, irrespective of whether the user is office- based or working from home. Desktop monitoring tools can add value in two main areas. First, gathering user sentiment feedback from employees through surveys. This helps IT departments assess the success of a deployment by asking staff questions like:
- How did the migration go?
- Did everything work correctly?
- Were there any issues experienced during the migration phase?
Second, these tools also mean that technical staff can remote manage and remote control a user’s desktop to review and fix issues. This can get really granular, with ‘remote shell’ functionality allowing the actual configuration of a device (with no need to buy third party tools to do this).
3 Optimisation
Without doubt, operating system migrations cost money. For organisations running the current version of Windows 10, the actual software upgrade to Windows 11 is free. But once you factor in the time to do all the planning, app testing and migration work, the hidden and actual costs are considerable, especially if you have to buy new hardware.
To get the most out of this investment, organisations should be looking to optimise and transform how they manage their estates. By rolling out digital employee experience (DEX) management tools as Windows 11 goes in, customers will get significantly more visibility and understanding of their IT around questions such as:
- How are their desktop and app environments performing?
- What’s the employee experience like?
- How are devices functioning?
- Where are bottlenecks and issues?
This allows IT departments to be more proactive and responsive to staff needs, reduces support tickets and ultimately puts them in control of their whole end user compute environment rather than it controlling them.
Back to the Countdown show. In one of the games, contestants are given vowels and consonants which they have to put in order to make the longest word possible.
It’s now time for all organisations to order their end user compute environment, if they are to effectively, quickly and safely adopt Windows 11.
Simon Townsend is Global Field CTO of ControlUp, which is reimagining Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management with real-time visibility, enabling 20X faster issue resolution on any desktop, any application, anywhere. ControlUp provides actionable, true AI-driven insights and proactive remediation tools to drive unbounded productivity for IT teams and employees. Nearly 2,000 customers across the globe trust ControlUp, including more than one-third of the Fortune 100.
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