Windows 10 as Windows Update Domain Question.

[Nick Yuhas]

What's up Guys, I have question that is probably unanswerable yet since the announcement was just made that Windows 10 will be pushed out as a Windows update in the near future. But what I am wondering is, In the past, when the upgrade was optional, a machine that was connected to the domain would not receive the pop ups suggesting the user to upgrade to windows 10. Which from a business stand point was very convenient because some of our software is proprietary and is not yet supported on Windows 10. However, I recently read that they will be starting to push Windows 10 out as a Windows update. What I am wondering is if they will be sending the update out to domain connected machines as well, or hold true to not pestering users that are connected to the domain like the have in the past with the pop ups.
I hope you guys can make sense of my question and let me know what you think, I contacted Microsoft support about this and they seemed to not even know what a domain was so that didn't get me to far. I am assuming it will be pushed out to every machine domain or not but I would like know for sure or hear some thoughts about this. Thanks.

 

[Trouble]

If your domain connected computers are part of an enterprise participating in Volume Licensing / Software Assurance they are likely considered, the equivalent of what they now call....
LTSB (Long Term Servicing Branch) rather than, like the rest of us CB (Current Branch) and will not likely be bothered by the upgrade nagging.
IF your current (Windows 7 / 8) licensing schema is just like the rest of us, then you may very well get it.
I guess the good news is that if you haven't seen any nagging so far (like the rest of us) then maybe you'll be safe for a while.
I'm not sure, how many desktops / laptops you're supporting and consequently how feasible it might be, but....
There are a few third party programs available the seem to work to do away with the GWX.exe persistence. I've been using this one, pretty successfully.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/gwx_control_panel.html
But on a few here and few there basis. IF you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of desktops, that might be a little unwieldy

 

[Nick Yuhas]

Hey Trouble, Thanks for your input. We have about 500 machines here but only a certain branch needs the proprietary software so I was actually looking into those GWX.eve removing programs. I think that would work if worse comes to worse. We do run most of our machines on a Volume Licensing configuration so I will have to look into that a bit more as well. I read somewhere that when they started with the optional upgrade that they configured it to not come up on machines that are a member of a domain. After some testing I figured out that this is true because a few of our machines were not on our domain and they were getting the Windows 10 pop up and once they were joined it has yet to come up again. I am just worried that when the make it into a windows update it will just push right through over night and we will have a disaster on our hands the next morning. We just put in a new active directory server so I am thinking about trying to create a group policy to stop this update.