The free Microsoft Press Guided Tours app is newly updated on Windows Store! The newest tour on our growing list is “Introducing Windows 10 for IT Professionals, Preview Edition.”
In this Windows 8.1 app, Microsoft Press authors provide insightful coverage of new and evolving Microsoft technologies. You can use the app to explore technical topics in powerful new ways, and you can mark up content in multiple ways so that it’s more useful to you.
The following six free guided tours are included in our app – and more are coming soon!
- Building cloud apps with Microsoft Azure (including best practices for DevOps, data storage, high availability, and more), by Scott Guthrie, Mark Simms, Tom Dykstra, Rick Anderson, and Mike Wasson
- Programming Windows Store apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, by author Kraig Brockschmidt
- Using Microsoft Azure HDInsight, by Avkash Chauhan, Valentine Fontama, Michele Hart, Wee Hyong Tok, and Buck Woody
- Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamentals of Azure, by Michael S. Collier and Robin E. Shahan
- Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Machine Learning, by Jeff Barnes
- Introducing Windows 10 for IT Professionals, Preview Edition, by Ed Bott
Look for additional tours in the near future. Learn more about the app’s features in this previous blog post. More details on contents included in this newest tour are below.
Introduction
I’ve written about Microsoft Windows for nearly a quarter-century, and in all that time I have never worked on a project like this one. Then again, I’ve never seen anything quite like Windows 10 from Microsoft, either.
This guided tour is a preview, a work in progress about a work in progress. It offers a snapshot of the Windows 10 Technical Preview as of April 2015, on the eve of the BUILD Developers’ Conference in San Francisco.
By design, this preview edition has a limited shelf life. After Microsoft releases Windows 10 to the general public this summer, I’ll revise and expand the content in this edition to reflect the finished product.
Windows 10 represents a major transformation of the PC landscape. For IT pros who’ve grown comfortable managing Microsoft Windows using a familiar set of tools and best practices, this version contains a startling amount of new. A new user experience. A new app platform. New security features and new management tools.
My goal in this tour is to help you sort out what’s new in the Windows 10 Technical Preview, with advance notice of features that will be available in the finished product but aren’t yet implemented. I’ve tried to lay out those facts in as neutral a fashion as possible, starting with an overview of the operating system, laying out the many changes to the user experience, and diving deep into deployment and management tools where it’s necessary.
Although I’ve written in-depth guides to Windows in the past, this tour is not one of those. It’s also not a review. Only you can decide whether, and how and when, to incorporate Windows 10 into your enterprise, based on your own organizational requirements. This tour is designed to serve as a rough guide so that you can get more out of your evaluation of the Windows 10 Technical Preview.
By design, this guided tour focuses on things that are new, with a special emphasis on topics of interest to IT pros. So you might find fewer tips and tricks about the new user experience than your users want but more about management, deployment, and security—which ultimately is what matters to the long-term well-being of the company you work for.
The Windows 10 Technical Preview offers anyone an opportunity to not just try out the next version of Windows but to provide feedback about the new operating system, in real time, to the team that is building it. I encourage you to share your feedback about this tour (or its ebook version) directly with me. E-mail your comments to me at feedback@realworldwindows.com.
Ed Bott
April 24, 2015
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Michael Niehaus, Chris Hallum, and Fred Pullen, who reviewed the content for this preview edition. I’d also like to thank the good folks at Microsoft Press—Anne Hamilton, Rob Linsky, and Rosemary Caperton—for their efforts at making this project happen on very short notice.
About the author
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology journalist and author who has been writing about Microsoft technologies for more than two decades. He is the author of more than 25 books on Microsoft Windows and Office and writes regularly about technology for The Ed Bott Report at ZDNet.