I’ll do a more detailed post on this in an upcoming series of tutorial focused posts, but for now it’s worth mentioning one of the things I haven’t had a chance to post about yet – Enterprise State Roaming is now GA. This continues the trend of Windows 10 and Azure Active Directory based capabilities that are really helping to eliminate the need for a consumer Microsoft Account. This is something that has been problematic for many organisations in the past, and this new capability, combined with Windows Store for Business (more posts on this to come) were very well received at a national series of roadshow events I just wrapped up with the Microsoft Education team on Windows 10 Anniversary Update (yes, I know, I need to post more about that too).  This doesn’t mean that the Microsoft Account requirement for organisational related purposes completely disappear for everyone, but it’s definitely getting closer.

The way I was able to easily demonstrate this feature was using a new Windows 10 Education virtual machine that I would perform an OOBE AAD Join, and within a short timeframe we would see the background image change, a very easy visual way to highlight activity, as well as showing Internet Explorer home page changes. Obviously there are more, but this was just to give a quick idea of the change. The other important thing to note that is the device that does the initial settings synchronisation needs to be activated, but non-activated devices can receive the changes, even though you can’t make some of the same customisations locally.

To get you going, here are some of the Azure team’s links for Enterprise State Roaming and closely related topics.

Enterprise State Roaming

Enable Enterprise State Roaming in Azure Active Directory

Settings and data roaming FAQ

Group policy and MDM settings for settings sync

Windows 10 roaming settings reference

Azure Active Domain Join

Connect domain-joined devices to Azure AD for Windows 10 experiences

Extending cloud capabilities to Windows 10 devices through Azure Active Directory Join

Learn about usage scenarios for Azure AD Join

Windows 10 for the enterprise: Ways to use devices for work

Set up Azure AD Join