Join me at Experts Live Europe on 23 August – 25 August in Berlin, Germany, where experts from around the world present discussion panels, ask-the-experts sessions and breakout sessions and cover the latest products, technologies and solutions from Microsoft. The conference will be held at Berlin Congress Center (bcc). If you aren’t familiar with it, the bcc is a great venue in a historic city that is located in the heart of Europe and the entire Germany’s road network convenes here, along with two airports and train station connected to the venue. The bcc enjoys a central location, hotels and shopping areas are close.

I have an embarrassment of riches regarding what to talk about this week, but instead, and apologies in advance for sounding like a record stuck in a groove, I am going to talk about Windows as a Service.

More specifically, about the changes to the branches. Microsoft is moving Windows 10 to the same servicing as Windows Server which means that they are transitioning from the Current Branch (CB) and Current Branch for Business (CBB) model of Windows releases to a twice-yearly release cadence called the Semi-Annual Channel. The release cadence will align to Windows Server and Office which means you can expect the updates to arrive in in March and in September, each of which with an 18-month servicing timeline. The Creators Update marks the first of the Semi-Annual Channel releases. Additionally, Microsoft is renaming the Long Term Servicing Branch (LTSB) to the Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC).

Of late, several customers I work with started deploying Windows 10 clients using an English base image and applying language packs in the process. They ran into a little snag involving localizing UWP apps.

In order to deploy and service Windows 10 successfully, you need to carefully consider how you apply language packs. In today’s blog post I will discuss the approach that I use to deploy and service Windows 10 in a multi language environment using Microsoft MDT and one base Windows 10 image.

This case unfolds with a customer piloting Windows 7 to Windows 10 in place upgrade. It’s a really interesting case because it highlights the use of Sysinternals Process Monitor and PowerShell to identify and fix an issue and also because it is actually two cases in one.

In order to deploy Windows 10 with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit successfully, you need to keep drivers for the actual operating system up to date. In today’s blog I will discuss the approach that I use to import and update Out-Of-Box drivers in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit using PowerShell.

If you are used to designing deployment solutions for big customers, driver management sometimes becomes a very time consuming task. Additionally, in the time where everything happens so rapidly: we are now seeing Windows Insider Preview every other week, we have production releases of Windows 10 twice a year and every now and then there are new hardware models being adding to the lineup. The fast cadence of Windows feature updates means that you need to keep your driver repository up-to-date which can become a daunting and actually a pretty boring task. The good news is that you can simplify your Out-of-Box drivers management by leveraging Microsoft Deployment Toolkit's PowerShell module meaning you can import or update all of the drivers that will be needed into your MDT Deployment Workbench in a fingersnap.