 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Savva Summit. We're so excited to have you. My name is Rebecca and my colleague is called Davana, and we will dive right into the Summit for Windows Admin Center. The title of our presentation is What's New and What's Coming, and just as the title suggests, we are speaking about what features we have recently added, and what features we are planning to add that you can anticipate. So a basic intro to the presenters. So my name is Rebecca Wambua on the right of your screen. I'm a Product Manager for Windows Admin Center. I deal majorly with feedback, incidences, the GPU tool, the events tool, and such and such. To the left of your screen is my colleague Davana White, and she's a Product Manager too at Windows Admin Center. Essentially, she deals with our partners that develop extensions with us, especially. She also deals with Azure Hybrid items, so you might have seen Azure Arc in your latest download. She built that. Yeah, so that's who we are, and we'll get into what's the agenda. So basically, before we dive into the details, we'll basically outline... I want us to do our outline for today's session. We're going to keep it concise but informative, so we'll start with a very brief product overview to set the stage. Whether or not you're new to Windows Admin Center or you're an experienced user, this will provide context for the updates that we are discussing. Then we'll move on to what's new. We have some very exciting features and enhancements that have been recently released, and these updates are designed to improve your experience and the functionality of Windows Admin Center. Following that, we'll look at what's coming, what's ahead. We'll discuss the future development in the pipeline, features, essentially, that we're working on and that you can look forward to, and then finally, we'll end with a couple of reminders. Just a few important notes to ensure you get the most out of Windows Admin Center and its capabilities. So our goal today is not just to inform you about the product, but to inspire you to utilize its full potential. So first of all, we will essentially get started with what is Windows Admin Center? So Windows Admin Center offers familiar functionality in server, modern server administration, and basically it's the future of server administration. Whereas you'd use a series of different tools to manage your Windows server, now we offer you one complete comprehensive tool that will actually take away the need to have all these other tools, and you can use it for your server administration. Basically, it's the future of server management. First of all, Windows Admin Center offers you familiar functionality. It brings together common system management tools that allow administrators who are used to the classic Windows management consoles to quickly find their way around. So this includes tools such as the firewall tool, events tool, performance monitoring, the VM tool, et cetera. Next, it's very easy to use and install. The Windows Admin Center is essentially designed to simplify the setup process, meaning you can get it up and running with basically no hassle. This ease of use basically extends to day-to-day management tasks, streamlining complex processes into user-friendly interfaces, et cetera. Also, WACC is designed to complement existing solutions. It doesn't replace your current management stack or infrastructure, rather it enhances it, meaning you can integrate it seamlessly into your environment, augmenting your existing management tools and processes. We complement tools such as Intune, MMC, et cetera. Another key feature is secure remote management with an emphasis on security. WACC allows admins to manage the system from anywhere while providing robust protections against potential threats. As you see, my colleague Davana will speak later on our secure call feature. Finally, it's Azure integrated. For those of you who are leveraging the cloud, WACC provides direct integration with Azure services. This allows you to have a hybrid approach to system management or a fully cloud approach to your system management. So you can get both benefits of on-prem or cloud, or if you want a bit of both. So basically, WACC is flexible, secure, and efficient, and it's integral to managing your Windows systems in the modern IT landscape. So next, we'll move on to what's new, which is quite exciting. So we'll start with the .NET upgrade. So basically, with a .NET upgrade, we are so excited to announce the public preview of the .NET upgrade for WACC, which you might hear referred to as Windows Admin Center V2 or the Modernized Gateway. So let's talk about what that means for you and your systems. The .NET platform is a core component of WACC. WACC is Windows Admin Center. And with this upgrade from .NET framework 4.6.2 to .NET core, we are laying the foundation of a host of improvements. Firstly, we want to give you improved performance. So you should expect faster load times, which means that you can manage your systems more efficiently than ever before. Time is valuable and we're ensuring you spend less of it waiting on your management tools. Next, we have bolstered security. We've improved cryptography. Security isn't just a feature, but a promise. With all these updates, your management activities are safeguarded with the latest advancement in secure communications. This upgrade also brings cross-platform support, which essentially expands WACC capabilities for a wider range of OSs. For those of you who are in diverse IT association, you know that this means more flexibility and accessibility. And last but not least, we have implemented HTTP2 support. This modern protocol reduces latency, but also improves overall web performance, making your management experience smoother and more responsive. In conclusion, the .NET upgrade is not just an update, it is a way for you to enhance the security and the efficiency and the reliability of your WACC, your Windows Admin Center Modernized Gateway Improvement. Next, we will see the visual of how much we can see the difference in page load times. So the old gateway, which for these purposes of this presentation we'll call V1, we have a 10 seconds performance time. But then with V2 or the Modernized Gateway, you can see we have slashed that right into half and we have five seconds. So this is just our commitment to improving your experience in terms of performance and reliability. Next, we'll also like to announce to you that we're excited to discuss that recent update in the virtual machine management. So we have network adapter support on the VM import. So what does this mean for you? Now importing VMs will be smoother and more intuitive and it basically mirrors the familiar functionality that you've experienced in Hyper-V. This aligns the processes across different platforms, making your workflows more consistent and less error-prone. Additionally, we're making continuous progress on the VM to load times. With every single release, we're chipping away at the delays aiming for a seamless and rapid experience. This is part of our commitment to efficiency and performance as we continually reiterate. We understand that managing virtual environments is a key part of your job and these updates are designed to make that work easier. Whether you're spinning up new instances or migrating existing ones, you can expect a more fluid, efficient and secure management experience. Then here's a demo of this improved time. So as you'll notice, we had actually cut down time before, but now we are farther away chipping away at that time. So as you can see, this finishes at 13.2 seconds while the old gateway finishes at 21.4 seconds. We are basically shaved off seven seconds and that's still part of our commitment. So you should expect such and such coming more of that coming through. So as you can see, the performance history of our VM tool, the times have actually gotten less and less. So from 55 seconds all the way down to 32 seconds, lower to 20 seconds and now currently at 15 seconds. So we're consistently making improvements and it's still part of our commitment. Then now we can move on to trigger updates for the update tools. As we continue to, let's turn our attention to the updates tool which has received some significant enhancements recently. First, it's worth noting that WAC now allows for seamless management of both Windows 10 and 11 PC machines. These machines can also be utilized as gateways, streamlining your management infrastructure and providing a unified experience across your network. Most notably, we have a new updates. You can now trigger machine updates with the same ease and functionality as a server experience. And that's a big step. The ability to initiate updates in a timely, flexible, controlled manner, it's very important, especially to maintain system security and performance while keeping in mind that you do have day-to-day operations happening on these servers. So we'll now also like to show you that we are taking advantage of the feedback that has been provided to us. We constantly go through this feedback. We are continuously listening to what you're saying and we're taking it very seriously. So now we'll look at a basic preview of this process happening. So you'll remote into one of your servers or desktops and you'll navigate all the way down to your updates tool. And now you'll see at the bottom section of the updates tool, the options to restart an update. So for instance, when you restart, you do the update. So you can choose either to restart immediately what was, which was that before, but now you can schedule your restart and select a specific date or in a specific time that you'd like to do your updates that aligns better now with your business processes and the operations so that you don't feel like the updates are taking too much of your time. As demonstrated here, you'll get a notification at the top right saying that you have successfully installed your updates. So now I will hand over to my colleague, Davana White, who will talk about what's coming. Welcome, Davana. Hey, everyone. Thank you, Rebecca, for re-emphasizing some of the awesome features that we've released recently. Now that we've covered exciting features that are already available, let's talk about some of the things that we're looking forward to that are coming soon in our next release and beyond. And we're going to start with Windows Labs. For those who are unaware of Windows Labs, it stands for Windows Local Administrator Password Solution. It is a Windows feature that automatically manages and backs up the password of a local administrator account on your Microsoft Entra joined or Windows Server Active Directory joined devices. Password management is a crucial component of your infrastructure security. The Windows Labs team has partnered with us to create an experience in Windows Admin Center to utilize all these amazing capabilities from retrieving your passwords to being able to open the RDP tool in Windows Admin Center and log in without entering your credentials because Windows Labs will fetch them automatically for you. As of right now, we are still working on bringing the design to life, but most of the backend work has been completed. So let's take a super secret sneak peek at what this tool would look like. Again, before we get started, these are mockups. These are not entirely, not necessarily representative of the final design of the tool, just to get that out of the way. Please do not take these mocks as gospel. So here we have a table listing all the machines that are Windows Labs enabled within our domain. This table also includes the ability to reveal your passwords and copy your passwords. In addition, it also has vital information such as the expiration timestamp for the password and the password update time. Those familiar with our standard angular controls will not be surprised that this table also comes with the standard functionality that presents inventory count, a refresh button as well as search for functionality. If we make our way to the action bar, you'll see the ability to set the expiration time and reset passwords for multiple passwords at a time. Not only that, but you'll be able to open the PowerShell tool in Windows Admin Center of the selected machine or remotely connect into the selected machine all without needing to enter in your credentials, as long as the machine has installed and configured Windows Labs. With this new tool extension, password management and authentication is simpler, efficient and more secured, saving you not only time, but potentially thousands of dollars in damages from something like a cybersecurity attack. If you would like to learn more about Windows Labs, please go to the link at the bottom of the slide, aka.ms slash LAPS. This, again, this feature is still under development, so we do ask that you not take the mocks I shared with you as gospel. They're still subject to change between now and the official release of the tool. Next, I want to talk about our hybrid investments. Those of you that are familiar with Windows Admin Center might have noticed our continued investment in our hybrid experiences, including our Azure portal offering. With infrastructure being increasingly hybrid these days, cloud integration is crucial because it ensures that you can not only easily manage your on-premises infrastructure, but also your Azure connected and cloud infrastructure. I am going to talk about our cloud offering, but first I want to talk about our Azure hybrid services. Lately, we've been focusing on three hybrid services, Azure Arc, Azure File Sync and our newest service, Azure Migrate. In the 2311 release of Windows Admin Center, we expanded the scope of Azure Arc onboarding to include onboarding at scale from our all connections page. You may have noticed that many of our Arc experiences are currently in preview today. Going forward, we're looking to bring these experiences up to general availability quality, and we're starting with our roots, the Azure Arc for Servers tool, which is accessible in settings when you're connected to a single server. Again, this redesign and feature is still in development and it hasn't been released yet. You're getting a super secret sneak peek here. We've given this tool a bit of an updated look and provided some additional information about your connected machine agent within Windows Admin Center. That way you can quickly get the status of your machine without navigating away to the Azure portal. We're also investigating ways to surface this additional information, such as agent less heartbeat and agent version, on the other areas that we provide Azure Arc status, such as the all connections page that I mentioned on the previous slide. If folks have thoughts about things they'd like to see here, please let me know or provide feedback through our feedback platform. In addition to the work we're doing with Azure Arc, we've also been working closely with the Azure File Sync team to improve the Azure File Sync onboarding experience in Windows Admin Center. Soon you can expect to see an updated error handling experience, more actionable error messages, and things of that nature, making getting started with Azure File Sync even easier through Windows Admin Center. We've also heard your feedback on the Azure Migrate Assessment Experience for Hyper-VVMs and are working on improvements in this space as well. We're working diligently with the Azure Migrate Team to determine how to provide you with an easy and useful experience to kickstart your migration journey through our familiar UI. Stay tuned for updates in this space. Now I would like to talk about our cloud offering. Our Windows Admin Center and Azure Portal offering lets you manage your Azure IaaS VMs and Arc-enabled infrastructure. The Azure IaaS VM offering is a generally available product and the offering to manage Arc-enabled infrastructure is in the public preview state. Our offerings provide you simple one-click deployment and connection experiences that make the management of your on-premises and cloud infrastructure possible through the single pane of glass that is the Azure Portal. Once you've deployed an IaaS VM or onboarded your machine to Azure Arc, there's no reason to go back to on-premises. There's no reason to think about how you need to connect to VPNs or RDP into your machine or any of that anymore. It's all provided through the experience we have built for Windows Admin Center in Azure. There are a lot of unique features that are currently specific to Windows Admin Center in Azure that are not on-premises and will likely never be available on-premises, meaning that this Windows Admin Center in Azure offering provides a ton of additional benefit to you, the user. This includes Azure RBAC access control, faster load times using the Azure Content Delivery Network, monthly updates, automated certificate management, and AAD authentication. In the last few months, we've widened our support matrix to include the use of just-in-time access and enterprise proxy support. We've also simplified the deployment of Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal, making it easier than ever to get started managing your infrastructure in depth through the cloud. Perhaps most excitingly, we are also planning on releasing support from Windows Client VMs. I'm gonna let my colleague, Prasitarora, explain what this experience is going to look like. Let's take a look at a new feature coming to Azure Virtual Machines running Windows Client, specifically Windows 10 or 11, Windows Admin Center. Windows Admin Center makes it seamless and consistent for you to manage your Windows Client operating systems natively from the Azure Portal. Let's take a look at how this works. Here, I've deployed an Azure Virtual Machine running Windows 11 Pro. On the left here, you'll see a new blade introduced called Windows Admin Center. For those of you that have used Windows Admin Center to manage your Azure VMs running Windows Server, you'll see a very familiar experience being introduced to Windows Client. Windows Admin Center in Azure unlocks incredible capabilities for the Azure Portal by providing you with an interface to manage the actual operating system of your Windows Client device. Windows Admin Center is the modern replacement to RDP, providing you with a native set of tools within the Azure Portal for complete OS management. It works by deploying a small agent on the Windows Client VM that accepts and processes operations made in the Azure Portal in near real time. Let's go ahead and deploy this agent. You'll have to go through a one-time installation process, following which you'll land on the connect screen. Access to the privileged operations that Windows Admin Center provides is controlled by an Azure RBAC role called Windows Admin Center Administrator Login. Ensure that your or your admin's Azure AD identities are part of this Azure RBAC role before using the tool. Now I can connect and start managing this Windows Client device. Windows Admin Center works exactly the same whether it's managing a Windows Server or Windows Client VM regardless of OS version. I can now use this tool to view my certificates, events, manage firewall rules, get a native PowerShell session, view my security threats, and so much more all within the Azure Portal. And finally, let's talk Windows Server 2025. I know we're all buzzing about the upcoming release. For Windows Server 2025, there are going to be a ton of new PowerShell Commandlets that will allow IT admins to do even more with their Windows Server infrastructure. Our team has selected some of the crucial experiences for which to create a management UI in Windows Admin Center. Here is a very rough map of those features and what you can expect once Windows Server 2025 is launched. Again, the launch of Server 2025 is a ways away and what I'm talking about today is subject to change, but I wanted to give y'all a little sneak peek into what we have planned. The first area of investment is the GPU P tool so you can continue to manage your AI workloads among other processes. For those of you familiar with the GPU tool for Azure Stack HCI, we expect the GPU P tool will look and feel similar to that already existing tool. Next is the improvements to the updates tools that you're able to grab all the latest security updates. And while we're on security, there will also be an expansion on our secure core compliance feature that will help your server stay secure and compliant. And lastly, to make it easier for IT admins to install the latest build of Windows Admin Center, we have built a setup that we're hoping to get inboxed with the Windows Server 2025 OS that will streamline the process. So now you don't have to deal with any of those long forms and not only that, it will be compatible with the Windows Server 2022 OS that's already available. And finally, it's going to be quick and simple and I'm going to show you that in this next slide. Before I begin, please know that things in this demo are subject to change, as I keep mentioning. Here we have a VM running Windows Server 2022 and this is the Windows Admin Center inbox setup. Upon clicking on it, it's going to ask for admin permissions to execute. And from here, if you'll land on this wizard, that will give you a standard intro into what Windows Admin Center is. Clicking on the next button will kick off the prerequisite checks, validating the system's OS, properly configured network and firewalls, and if there's available disk space before downloading the latest generally available version of Windows Admin Center. This demo is actually downloading the preview version of the modernized gateway, which I have mentioned previous, which Rebecca talked about earlier in these slides. But once it's downloaded, you can click install, start the installation process and within a couple clicks, you'll have Windows Admin Center installed and ready to use. I want to finish out by giving everyone a couple of reminders. These are primarily going to be relevant for folks who have made a Windows Admin Center extension or planning on developing a Windows Admin Center extension in the future. As a reminder, Windows Admin Center was built to be extensible and anyone can build an extension on our platform using our publicly available SDK. For more information about extensibility in Windows Admin Center, reach out to me directly or visit our documentation at aka.ms slash extend WAC. The first reminder is that with our 2311 generally available build of Windows Admin Center, as well as the public preview of our .NET Core Build, we have updated our Angular framework from Angular 11 to Angular 15. This also includes a majority of our extensions. In order to get the latest and greatest functionality as well as updated security, we highly encourage all of our development partners to update their extensions to use Angular 15 as soon as they can. If you're not sure how to get started, we've provided an update guide in our public documentation that includes the requirements for updating step-by-step instructions on how to update and troubleshooting steps in case you get stuck during the update process. We know that for our long-standing partners, our previous update from Angular 7 to Angular 11 may have been a bit arduous. That's what the feedback I've received. So this time around, we've also built an update command into our public-facing SDK that should perform much of the update actions for you. Instructions and troubleshooting steps for using this command are also included in this public documentation guide. If you read the guide and still find yourself stuck, that's totally fine. Please feel free to reach out to us at wacextdevsupportatmicrosoft.com or reach out to me directly. We are more than willing to help you debugs. You can keep your extension up to date with our frameworks and getting all the latest goodness from Angular. In addition to the framework update we've done recently, folks should also be aware that the .NET upgrade, otherwise known as the modernized gateway effort, will affect new and existing extensions. As Rebecca discussed earlier in this presentation, the modernized gateway effort involves a move from the .NET version 4.6.2 to .NET Core, which is a huge shift. We've taken this opportunity to rewrite the Windows Admin Center backend to be more efficient and flexible, which also included considerations for increased extension flexibility. The benefits of this rewrite will be most noticeable for those who have or are considering developing a gateway plugin extension, which are extensions that enable API communication from the UI to your target node. These extensions are the only extension type that communicates with Windows Admin Centers backend in depth. And as a result, these extensions will need to be upgraded from the existing framework to the new framework, which uses .NET Core and standard ASP.NET controllers. The amount of work that will be required for this migration really depends on the complexity of your extension, as well as how well you've previously adhered to Windows Admin Center's design principles. We've composed guidance for installing, using, and testing your extensions with the modernized Windows Admin Center gateway, which include information on how to migrate existing gateway plugin extensions. The guidance also includes sample code, and that can be modified to kickstart the migration process. While tool and solution extensions shouldn't be affected too much by this backend change, it's good practice to test your extension anyways to ensure that it will work with the modernized gateway. We've now published this guidance in our public documentation. If you read this guidance and have additional questions, please email WAC, EXT, devsupportatmicrosoft.com, or again, me directly, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And lastly, I wanted to briefly call out some of the ways you can stay connected with Windows Admin Center and our work. I've made multiple callouts to our public documentation as I've been speaking today. The public documentation can be found at aka.ms slash WAC docs. Additionally, we've talked about two different builds of Windows Admin Center throughout this presentation. Our latest generally available build, version 2311, can be downloaded through the aka.ms slash download WAC link. For those of you interested in the GotNet Core upgrade build, which I highly recommend trying out, especially if you are already familiar with Windows Admin Center. It's currently in public preview and can be downloaded through the Windows Server Insider Program. We've included a quick link here at aka.ms slash WAC Insider. We do encourage you again to try this build out and provide feedback. It should look and function very similarly to the current generally available build, but with all the security and performance benefits that we discussed earlier in the presentation. We are also on X, formerly Twitter, under the handle server MGMT, please give us a follow. And finally, as you're using Windows Admin Center, you can provide feedback to us about the product through the link aka.ms slash WAC feedback. That's all the content we have for you today. Thank you all so much for attending and listening to how we're continuing to improve Windows Server Management through Windows Admin Center. I've included our names and contact information on this slide. If you have any further questions about our presentation or Windows Admin Center generally, please feel free to reach out to either of us via email. In just a second, you're going to see a slide with the opportunity to provide feedback. Your feedback is incredibly important to us, so please take the time to fill out this feedback form. Thank you again.