Microsoft rolled out the first major upgrade for Windows 10 yesterday, with a big emphasis on some nifty new enterprise features it’s hoping will tempt more organizations to install the latest edition of its operating system.

Along with the more obvious new features like the Cortana upgrades and new, colored tilebars, the new enterprise features are designed to make Windows 10 more user-friendly to the business customers that generate the bulk of Microsoft’s revenues.

“With this free update we have reached the point in the platform’s maturity where we can confidently recommend Windows 10 deployment to whole organizations,” wrote Microsoft Windows Boss Terry Myerson in a blog post.

No more “continuous” updates

The main enterprise-oriented improvement in Windows 10 is designed to give companies the opportunity to defer certain updates or cease installing them altogether. It’s an important ability for organizations to have, because they can ill afford to experience any “surprises” that the “continuous update” aspect of Windows 10 could present.

Called Windows Update for Business (WU4B), the new feature has been in the works for over a year. The tool provides IT admins with a set of tools that lets them delay the installation of updates until they’ve finished compatibility testing. Failing that, it at least lets them wait to see if any of Microsoft’s patches cause widespread problems like the Outlook foul up that occurred in the wake of this week’s patch.

WU4B works with the Professional, Enterprise and Education editions of Windows 10. With the new feature, update packages are divided into three classes, and each one comes with its own set of management controls.

Admins will have the most control over ‘OS upgrades’, which represent new, major releases of Windows (like today’s release). These new milestones in the Current Branch for Business will be delivered two-to-three times a year, and can be delayed each month for a total of eight months, after which they must be installed.

‘Updates’ include things such as Critical updates, Security updates and new device drivers. They’re pretty similar to the upgrades delivered in Microsoft’s traditional Patch Tuesday cycle, and can be deferred each week for a total four weeks.

The final class of upgrade is Definition updates, which Microsoft says are mandatory and cannot be deferred.

For organizations that follow an extremely conservative upgrade cycle, Microsoft has made the Long Term Servicing Branch available. Today’s release (Build 1511) is the Current Branch for Business, but Build 10240 (the initial Windows 10 release) remains as the current LTSB release.

Windows Store for Business goes live

A second important new feature for enterprises is the Windows Store for Business, which we first reported on last week. The main idea behind the business store is it lets companies distribute apps to employees using the Windows Store front-end, in a new ‘company-specific’ section that the general public cannot access. Companies can promote both their private apps and public apps in this section, which means it should serve as the main repository for organization’s internal software and widely-used public apps.

Windows 10 still lacks one crucial business feature that may put off more guarded enterprises from upgrading just yet. In his blog post, Myerson said the company is still shaping its new Enterprise Data Protection feature that lets organizations encrypt and manage corporate data on BYOD devices, without interfering with employees’ personal data. Myerson said the infrastructure is already in place, but the feature won’t be ready until early 2016.

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