1 Abilities2 Availability
MMD is a cloud-based service that bundles Microsoft 365 Enterprise, device as a service, and remote device management. The idea behind the integration is to help businesses make their IT departments more efficient. There is a real focus on business and not desktop management. In its announcement, Microsoft Managed Desktop was developed after collaboration with small and large organizations. One of the most frequent comments from customers was a lack of time to maintain changing technologies. From keeping secure and updating to new solutions, companies are often stretched in IT. Thanks to the cloud, organizations can now use MMD to take much of the heavy lifting.
Abilities
MMD arrives with the following additions: “Great experience with Microsoft 365 on modern devices—Our goal with MMD is to provide a great experience for users while keeping devices secure and up to date. MMD relies on the power of Microsoft 365, running in a consistent, lightweight, reference architecture that continues to evolve to allow our customers to take full advantage of our intelligent security capabilities to protect them from nascent threats. Importantly, MMD is built on modern devices that meet our specification and runtime quality bar. Analytics benefit all customers—Analytics are at the heart of MMD. We leverage analytics to provide operational and security insights and learnings, so we can constantly monitor and improve, as well as enable us to manage the global MMD device population. As an example, we use insights and AI to determine which devices are ready for feature updates or, conversely, whether a specific app is blocking a device’s ability to update so we can act. Customer and partner insight and feedback—Customer feedback and insight are also at the heart of MMD. We have deployed MMD in a measured approach with a set of early customers, leading to hundreds of changes in Microsoft 365 to better enable end-to-end scenarios for customers around the world.”
Availability
Among Microsoft customers already working with MMD include Seattle Reign FC, Lloyds Banking Group, Dell, and HP. Microsoft Managed Desktop is available now, but only to customers in the United States and United Kingdom. Organizations in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will gain support in early 2019. This suggests MMD is so far limited to English, but we guess it will be expanded to other languages eventually.
