Introducing the Windows 365 App

[anyweb]

Introduction

Satya Nadella just announced the Windows 365 app at Ignite 2022 today, and you can see that in the keynote below.

 

He said that the new app means you can access Windows 365 directly from your taskbar or start menu. The Windows 365 app is now in public preview, providing a direct path to Windows 365 from the Task Bar or Start menu with a personal, customized experience that can be tailored to each individual.

Getting the Windows 365 app

Note: If you'd like to get started with Windows 365 see here.

To get the app, you need to be using Windows 11 and to have a Cloud PC available. Windows 10 does not support the app.

On a Windows 11 PC, open Microsoft Store and search for Windows 365, it's currently in preview.

Click on Get and it'll start downloading. After that app is downloaded and installed it will auto launch in the context of the user you are logged in as,

the user I was using didn't have a Windows 365 Cloud PC assigned so I signed in as a user that did have one available, after doing that I got to see the 4 screen intro which you can optionally skip, it was my first time seeing this so I wanted to see each screen.

here's screen 1

here's screen 2

here's screen 3

and the final screen

after completing the Intro, you get access to your Cloud PC and are treated to another tour, which you can also skip.

The tour has an additional item and that is to provide feedback, shown here.

To launch your Cloud PC, click on the Connect button. It will probably say 'Authenticating',

in my case nothing happened after that except it failed to connect and showed an error and 'see details'.

I determined that the reason it failed to 'Connect' was because the popup asking for the user credentials was behind the Windows 365 app, and therefore I didn't see it.

In the below screenshot you can see the error and the Windows Security window which I've now moved on-top of the Windows 365 app

After clicking Connect again and entering my credentials all was good and my Cloud PC launched.

The connection seems to be an actual RDP session so it's definitely a better option than the default Web browser session which you can launch via https://windows365.microsoft.com

If you are docked to multiple monitors it will open the Windows 365 Cloud PC session on all monitors, and in my case that's 3 monitors side by side.

pressing ESC when fullscreen allows you to then set settings in the RDP session like below

 

You can always launch the app again from the Start menu as you can see here

or via the taskbar as you can see here

For more info, see the official Microsoft announcement here.

until next time, cheers