Microsoft has upgraded its own internal Windows 11 rollout to 190,000 PCs worldwide, but was unable to upgrade all PCs to Windows 11 because some employees’ systems did not meet one of the key hardware requirements.
“Windows 11 has specific hardware requirements and a percentage of our devices were not upgraded. The employees with these devices will continue to run Windows 10 in parallel and get a Windows 11 device at their next device refresh,” Microsoft’s Lukas Velush stated in a blog post.
According to Microsoft, “Microsoft’s upgrade to Windows 11 is largely considered the smoothest we’ve ever had.”
To carry out the upgrade, the company used proprietary tools such as the Azure Update Compliance Service in combination with Microsoft Endpoint Manager’s Endpoint analytics feature to identify devices that meet and do not meet the minimum requirements.
Microsoft used Update Compliance to determine which PCs should be excluded from the Windows 11 rollout, allowing the deployment team, known as the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, to apply controls to unapproved devices and automatically skip them during deployment.