Extending that lifecycle -again

Patch Lady here:  In today’s Microsoft 365 blog, Microsoft is announcing a lifecycle extension for Enterprise customers.  For those with Enterprise licensing agreements you will now have 30 months of support rather than the 18 months of support before you have to update to the next feature release.

What does this mean to you and I the common folk running Windows 10 Home and Pro versions?  Not a darn thing.  We will still need to be planning to get up to the next feature release over the year and a 1/2 we have now.  This does reinforce that this feature release cadence is near impossible for businesses (large ones especially) to handle.

• All future feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a targeted release month of September (starting with 1809) will be supported for 30 months from their release date. This will give customers with longer deployment cycles the time they need to plan, test, and deploy.

• All future feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a targeted release month of March (starting with 1903) will continue to be supported for 18 months from their release date. This maintains the semi-annual update cadence as our north star and retains the option for customers that want to update twice a year.

For those of you in Enterprise – you’ll need to keep track if you updated in the September release and therefore get 30 months of support or the March release and only then get the 18 months of support.

It seems to me that there is still a disconnect between what Microsoft is building and what the reality of businesses are at today.  In another recent post – The Server team blogged about the Essentials 2019 server release –  however it’s a server version that won’t include the remote access module (Remote web access) that Small Business Server and Essentials 2016 had, doesn’t have client workstation backup because we should all be using OneDrive as our backup means.  Microsoft ignores the fact that when the you know what hits the fan and Windows 10 desktops break from either bad patches, or hardware issues, or ransomware, or any other major issue, having an on site desktop restore process that puts the workstation EXACTLY back as it was gets that small business up and running quickly.

While some small businesses are all cloud applications, online QuickBooks, and syncing files with Onedrive, there’s a set of businesses that I come across every day that have their feet still planted in premise software.

The announcement about the extension of the Microsoft lifecycle is great for Enterprises but does nothing for small businesses nor consumers.  All customers of Microsoft deserve the right to set the patching cadence that fits their needs.

Similarly the announcement over the Essentials 2019 server product doesn’t fix the bugs in Essentials 2016 server, nor does it provide a small business who still has premise software needs any sort of good solutions for remote access, client workstation backup.  Yes there are third party solutions out there, but not as integrated, not with as much security and as inexpensively.

Both announcements showcase that Microsoft is listening, but still not going far enough to provide real solutions to their customer base.