How to upgrade your entire fleet of Windows 7 PCs to Windows 10

Still running Windows 7 systems and want a simple, streamlined way to upgrade? In association with OneDeploy, we explain how to make the impossible easy

If you read Jon Honeyball’s column last month ( see issue 278, p110), you’ll have seen his take on Centrality’s OneDeploy software. “If I had hundreds, or worse still, thousands of machines to move to Windows 10, OneDeploy would be top of my list of tools under consideration,” he wrote.

Why? Simplicity is one of OneDeploy’s key features, with the ability to create builds in a matter of minutes compared to the hours of System Center. Plus, where System Center can lag behind Microsoft’s latest OS updates by six to 12 months, OneDeploy is right at the cutting edge. “OneDeploy is very much at the fore of being able to deploy even the latest operating systems,” said Mike Davies, managing director and founder of OneDeploy.

Once you’ve created a build – say with 64-bit Windows 10 Enterprise, Office 365 and specific drivers for your fleet of PCs – you’re ready to roll it out. “OneDeploy allows us to standardise across multiple hardware types, multiple use cases and multiple types of software to provide a rock-solid platform across the enterprise,” said Davies.

You can lock down this process as much as you like. Perhaps, for instance, you want to let the end user choose whether or not to install Chrome. Then leave them the option during the install process. But if you want a fully automated install, that’s fine too: you don’t even need an engineer on-premises, so you could upgrade a fleet of Windows 7 PCs to Windows 10 in under an hour.

And, as Jon Honeyball explained last month, the fact that the latest chipsets and Windows 7 “don’t get along very well”, along with support ending in 2020, mean the need to jump from Windows 7 is becoming more urgent each passing month.

OneDeploy in action

To put this into focus, consider the challenge facing a large hospitality company that needed to upgrade machines in situ. “They needed to reinstall the operating system and install a new EPOS system on all their existing estate, consisting of nearly 700 outlets and about 4,500 PCs,” said Daniel Wyness, technology manager at OneDeploy.

“Having the on-site build process allowed the help desk operators to fix any problems remotely and they could initiate a rebuild without an engineer visit. If an engineer does have to visit with a new piece of equipment, that process is automated so the engineer time can be minimal.”

When the employees came in the next day, their workstations were up and running with all the approved applications in place.

How OneDeploy works

OneDeploy is based on three building blocks: operating systems, drivers and applications. “Once we have threaded in the three main building blocks of the build, we’re ready to create a build template,” said Wyness. “You can have as few or as many build templates as required.”

It’s easy to adapt builds once created. For example, you can add or remove applications from a build with a single click of the mouse. “When the computer is booted up I now have a fully complete Windows 10 build with operating system settings, applications and drivers.”

There’s also a big time-saving benefit to OneDeploy, he explains. “The setup time, in terms of getting the product installed, up and running and ready to install builds, can be done in minutes – as opposed to some of the build methods developed by Microsoft that can take hours or days.

“Plus, architecturally, OneDeploy is very simple. There’s no need for a big back-end infrastructure. You can deploy PCs from a fileshare – that fileshare can be on a desktop PC, it could be on an engineer laptop, or it could be on a server.”