Microsoft 365 Business and Upgrade Analytics – Collecting Data From Previous Windows Pro Editions

Following on from the last post which was an introduction to the Windows Analytics Upgrade Analytics solution in Operations Management Suite, today's post is on collecting data from your Windows 7 Pro and Windows 8.x Pro devices. For this post I will be using the Pilot version of the Upgrade Readiness Deployment Script to collect data from a couple of PCs rather than using an automated deployment option.

Before jumping in to the instructions, it's worth discussing how many PCs you should consider collecting data from. The best answer is "all of them", but the realities of the situation is that you may not be able to access all of the devices in a timely manner, which means starting small and then scaling up as other devices become available. If you are dealing with a large variety of PCs and installed software, then you are going to need a larger sample size. If you are working in an environment with limited hardware and software variation, you might be able to get away with targeting a smaller group of devices and extrapolate from there. The initial client data upload is only around 2MB in size, which means that it should only be around 600MB for the 300 users maximum that Microsoft 365 Business supports.

Now that we've covered the basics of targeting, head to /en-us/windows/deployment/upgrade/upgrade-readiness-deployment-script to download the script and save it locally.

After downloading the Upgrade Readiness Deployment Script to one of the PCs, extract its contents.

The RunConfig.bat file in the Pilot folder is what we need to edit.

The first thing we need to do is add our CommercialIDValue.. Where do we get this?

Heading back to the first post in the series we grab the CommercialIDValue (which I have hidden on this screenshot).

Next up is allowing IE data collection if required, which is a two part process, first of all you need to allow data collection, and then choose the collection level. Save the file and return to explorer.

Choose Run as Administrator for RunConfig.bat. Accept the UAC promptto allow the script to run.

This will take a minute or so, let it run until complete.

Once complete, head to the UADiagnostics folder and verify that the script ran successfully. Follow this process on other machines you want to evaluate, and after a while you should see them appear in the OMS Workspace.

I had to click the Generate Report button, which advises that the computers should be visible in the workspace within 48-72 hours, which makes this a good place to end this post.