Please provide guidance on this topic. We would also like to know the best way to get our client devices updated to Windows 11 with as little inconvenience as possible.

Hello,

To deploy Windows 11, you will need to configure the TargetRelease and TargetReleaseVersion on the endpoints. These registry settings are located at “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate”. More information on the background of these settings is available on the Microsoft documentation site. The TargetRelease will be “Windows 11“, and the TargetReleaseVersion will be the build you wish to deploy - such as “21H2”. This change can be made in the registry using a worklet (using the New-ItemProperty cmdlet), or through any of the other methods outlined in the Microsoft documentation. After this, a patch policy targeting Windows 11 updates would be expected to upgrade the endpoint.

Much appreciated, I’ll give this approach a try.

I have devices cordoned off in a test environment that I’ll try this on, but will making these registry changes to devices that do not meet the Windows 11 requirements result in any known issues?

While that scenario specifically isn’t one that I have tested, I am not aware of any issues. In general, I would expect the device to not attempt the update in that scenario, or fail during verification of prerequisites.

The registry portion I am aware of from when we updated Windows 10 to the latest feature update. However, I might be blind, but I’m not seeing an update to Windows 11 in the patch updates.