Microsoft’s internal upgrade to Windows 11

Microsoft's upgrade to Windows 11 is largely considered the smoothest we've ever had. The Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team was able to upgrade 190,000 employee devices in just five weeks. We learned a lot so, in this post, I'm sharing our learnings with you to help with your deployment journey.

Our success was built around several factors: far fewer app compatibility challenges than in the past, not needing to build out a plethora of disk images, and delivery processes and tools already that were greatly improved during the rollout of Windows 10. We divided our upgrade into three stages: plan, prepare, and deploy.

It would be pretty pathetic if not even Microsoft itself could smoothly update its employees' machines to the latest version of Windows, but that being said - I do not envy the people tasked with doing so.