Bill Predmore, president and co-owner of professional women’s soccer team the Seattle Reign, has enough to worry about without managing PCs. “I don’t want to have to think about technology,” he told CIO.com. “I want it to be like a utility where I flip a switch and it just works.”

So, in December 2017, the Seattle Reign turned to a private preview of Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD), a new desktop management service from Microsoft, which Predmore heard about in advance as the company is a team sponsor. With MMD, corporate customers receive access to Microsoft 365 on a modern device that is managed by Microsoft.

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For the Seattle Reign this means a mix of Surface laptops, some Surface Pros that are used on the field and off, and one Surface Studio. Microsoft also supports devices from HP and Dell, with the baseline for support being a spec that includes a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip, biometric login, and high-quality drivers.

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