 Hi, my name is Patrick Loner and I'll be your instructor on this course. Wanted to start just with a little bit about my background. I've been in the IT industry for a little bit over 15 years and been heavily involved with Microsoft operating systems since way back in the Windows NT four days. I primarily worked as a Microsoft certified trainer at a number of different locations but I've also been involved in some consulting agencies, going out and helping companies to do deployments of a new operating system, deployments of new Windows servers, as well as working heavily with Microsoft Exchange. I've worked with the client end of the operating system in both a deployment or from a deployment standpoint as well as from a support standpoint. And Windows 10 is really no different. I was really excited to see Windows 10 because some of the disadvantages of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 and the lack of adoption. So Windows 10 fixed a lot of those problems. So I jumped in very early on with the beta versions of this operating system and have been working with it ever since. So my hope that throughout the course you'll be able to get all of the information that you need from me from a practical standpoint as well as for exam prep. So what makes Windows 10 different? Is it simply the next version of the Microsoft Windows operating system that is just destined to be replaced in a couple of years or is it something different? It is in fact something different. It's not like it's predecessors in many ways. It is not simply a new revision of the operating system. Now notice from what we say there, it is a revision of the operating system, but it's not only that. This is created or Windows 10 has been created, first of all, to span a wide range of devices. Microsoft started this back with Windows 8. They just weren't overly successful at what they were trying to achieve. They were trying to achieve a version of the operating system that looks and feels exactly the same regardless of the type of device that you have it installed on. So Windows 10 can be installed on smartphones. It can be installed on tablets like the Microsoft Surface or other vendors' tablets. And it can be installed on laptops and desktops both in home as well as corporate environments. But the idea is that the look and the feel, the way that you configure settings is going to be exactly the same on all of those devices. Now this is important in today's industry because in today's industry it's very much a BYOD type of environment. BYOD is bring your own device. And so we've got, of course, home users that are using various devices that would have Windows 10 installed on them, presumably. But we've got corporate users that also follow that same line of thinking. Mobile devices are everywhere. Everybody has at least one mobile device. And in many cases people have more than one mobile device. And so Microsoft really was trying to achieve a version of the OS that looked and felt the same across all those devices. They attempted it in Windows 8 and 8.1. That's why you saw the major user experience changes such as the start screen and things like that. But it didn't really take off too well. And Windows 10 is here to try to remedy some of those issues. This then is the final evolution of the start experience. We've had a start menu in Windows XP and Windows 7. I skipped Windows Vista, but of course that was included. But Windows 8 came out and there was no longer any start menu. Just a start screen. And the whole idea was that if a user had Windows 8 installed on a tablet, they would be using touch input and the start screen, the tile interface, would make things easier for them to do, for them to access those different apps or settings and whatnot. But it was sort of cumbersome for the users of desktops to have to go toward to this start screen as opposed to the standard start menu. So they tried to fix it in Windows 8.1 and they added a start menu, quote unquote, back in. But it really wasn't much of a start menu. It was more of an administrative menu that would get you into settings, couldn't get you into programs and whatnot. What we have in Windows 10 is the evolution of both of those things. So we have a start menu that gives access to frequent programs, pinned items. But on that start menu, we will also have the live tiles that you saw on the Windows 8 and 8.1 start screen. And we'll get into that in more detail. That's definitely one of those areas where it's easier to talk about as we're looking at it. This is also a culmination of the good features of Windows 8, 8.1 and Windows 7. So some of the features that we had in those operating systems have gone away and the features that still exist were the ones that were deemed useful. And in many cases, they are also enhanced. We also have a new updates model, which we'll get more into in just a bit. This is quite possibly the last major Windows release that we will see. Microsoft does not intend for there to be a Windows 11 in two years. This is one of the major reasons that Windows 10 is not like its predecessors. Microsoft is really adopting more of the Apple model of slight revisions to the operating system being released through the Windows update process, as opposed to a full-on deployment of the new OS. So that new updates model is a concept of continuous improvement. Instead of waiting or as soon as Windows 10 has been deployed, now we start immediately working on the next version of the operating system, they are going to continually improve this addition of the operating system. So new features are going to be delivered through Windows update, as opposed to being set aside until the next major release. And they're from an enterprise standpoint, and even from a home standpoint, you can opt into different levels of updates. Fast ring, slow ring, current branch are those levels. Basically what that means is you can go into the Windows update option in the settings app in Windows 10 and say, I want to receive new revisions to the operating system. You can even get into what's called the Insider Preview Program, and you can get new versions of the OS or updates to the OS before they're actually publicly released. That would be your fast ring. Slow ring would be, I'm gonna get the updates after they've already been deployed in public for six months. Current branch is something that enterprises are typically going to use. We can deal with that a little bit more when we talk about updates. But that is one of your major changes. And actually Windows 10 has already undergone one of these revisions. I can't recall right off the top of my head the revision number, but just in the last couple of weeks, there was a Windows update that came out and it was a new build of Windows 10. And it actually added a whole bunch of different features to the start menu and the general user experience, as well as some things behind the scene at the enterprise level. Another thing that makes Windows 10 different is its heavy reliance and integration with cloud-based services. A few years ago, when the term cloud started getting thrown around, there was a lot of mystery and ambiguity that was associated with it. The cloud is apparently here to stay. If you're not familiar with what the cloud is, essentially just think of the cloud as a set of servers that provide services for customers because, and I know that's really a very broad term. But when we talk about public cloud offerings like Azure, Windows Azure, Office 365, Windows Intune, that's exactly what it is. These are servers that are spread throughout the world in Microsoft data centers that provide subscription-based services to consumers. And the consumer can be an individual, the consumer can be a business. So to give you a couple for instances, an individual can subscribe to Office 365 on a personal level. You can pay $6 a month or $8 a month and you can get all five of the major office programs and your email hosted. You are subscribing to software as a service and that's a public cloud type of offering. They're providing that service to you on a subscription basis. On a business side of things, we could use Office 365 as well. But let's say we use Microsoft Azure. And so Microsoft Azure provides me the ability to stand up virtual servers to provide different types of capabilities. Maybe I want to outsource a VPN infrastructure. Maybe I want to outsource the hosting of a web application and database that supports that web application. Those are one of 30 examples that we'd use for Microsoft Azure. But the point is is that the cloud is here to stay and many organizations are moving toward those cloud-based services. And so therefore we need a version of the operating system that integrates with them correctly. And so Windows 10 now has the ability to join a Microsoft Azure hosted Active Directory environment. You may be familiar already with Active Directory. Usually when we use that term, we're talking about Active Directory domain services, which is a Windows server feature that's installed on our machines. We set up a domain environment and everybody joins the domain for the centralized administration of resources and for the purposes of security. But Active Directory can also be hosted in Windows Azure. And we can join now Windows 10 machine to that. Windows 10 automatically integrates with Office 365 as well. Windows Intune is often a new one to many people. We will, there's certainly a lot of information about Windows Intune. But basically it is a cloud-based management solution. A better term might be mobile device management, MDM for short. Which essentially just allows me to manage devices that may not actually be a part of a domain. And that's the best general description of Windows Intune. So users may have smartphones and tablets or home PCs or roaming laptops in a corporate environment. And we have a cloud-based solution that can control the apps that are installed on those devices, can control security on those devices and various other aspects of the device. That's Windows Intune. And then OneDrive is a cloud type of storage. So most of us are familiar with Dropbox and Google Drive and Apple's iCloud storage and Amazon Drive and all these different storage capabilities. They're all in the public cloud. Well, Microsoft's version of this is OneDrive and Windows 10 automatically integrates with OneDrive. If you have a Microsoft account, then you automatically have X amount of space in OneDrive and you can utilize that to store your information. And not only to store your information, but then to have your information available to you across multiple devices. That's kind of the key behind cloud-based storage. And so Windows 10 is the first operating system that fully integrates with all of these cloud-based services.