We're planning to move our organization from Windows 11 24H2 to 25H2 and want to prepare a practical review checklist. We're especially interested in new features and settings, security and privacy changes, services or features that should be disabled or restricted, removed or deprecated functionality, new Group Policy and Intune options, updated security baseline recommendations, and anything that could affect existing applications or policies. Has anyone created a checklist, spreadsheet, or deployment template for reviewing these items before moving 25H2 into production?
5 Answers
Use Microsoft’s Group Policy settings reference spreadsheet to filter for settings marked as new in 25H2. That gives you a quick way to identify additions to the administrative templates. Also review Recall and related local AI features in your privacy and security policies; even if they are not currently a major concern, many administrators choose to disable or tightly control them proactively.
For most 24H2 systems, the existing deployment configuration and security baseline should remain a good starting point. Update it with any newly recommended settings, verify application compatibility, and pay attention to support timelines for your Windows edition. The larger migration effort is usually moving from 23H2; 24H2 to 25H2 is comparatively straightforward.
Don’t assume every issue is caused by the enablement package. Test RDP workflows, file preview behavior involving Mark-of-the-Web protections, and older applications that depend on VBScript. Some legacy platforms and vendor tools still rely on VBScript, so confirm vendor support before changing or removing related functionality.
The move from 24H2 to 25H2 is generally a minor enablement-package update rather than a full operating-system upgrade. The two releases share the same baseline, so installation is usually quick and mainly enables features or changes the build configuration. We still tested specialty applications with a small group of users before deploying broadly, but the process was much less disruptive than moving from an older release.
That’s helpful. It sounds like the main effort should be targeted application testing and policy review rather than treating this as a major operating-system migration.
For deployment, test with users from different departments, then roll out the enablement package in batches and schedule the required reboot. One organization reported that groups of roughly 30 devices worked well after testing around ten representative users. Most visible changes were minor, although users coming from older releases may notice more differences.
Good point about separating the 23H2-to-25H2 changes from the actual 24H2-to-25H2 update. We’ll make sure our testing scope reflects the versions each device is coming from.