Windows 365

Microsoft released a new offer: Windows Cloud-PC. You can choose between two licensing types, Windows 365 Business for small companies and Enterprise for larger ones. Technical speaking, Windows 365 is nothing more than a Windows 10 VM running in Azure providing access via RDP and RDP Web Client. This means you can operation your Windows from almost any device with a Browser e.g. a Tablet or shared PC. Windows 365 is integrated within Office 365. You can assign a cloud pc to a user from within the Office 365 admin panel. Users can access the cloud pc from Office 365.

In contrast to a typical Azure VM, Windows 365 comes with a fixed price you pay per month depending on the sizing. Unfortunately, you can only choose from different configurations based on CPU and RAM but not storage technology. For example, if you select a cheaper one with 2 cores and 4 GB RAM you will get a HDD instead of an SSD.

In theory you can use a Cloud-PC from a tablet, like in my case from a Samsung Galaxy Tab. But in practice it turns out that it is very buggy to use. The on-screen keyboard pops up very often. The full-screen view resizes many times. Calling the Windows start menu triggers strange actions. One opportunity for Windows 365 could be to provide Home-Office users a workplace.