Microsoft announced its Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD) service a few months back. This desktop-as-a-service is essentially Microsoft's way of helping businesses set up, update, and manage Windows 10 machines.While businesses are offered new Windows 10 updates a few months after they have been made available to Windows 10 Home users, they still do manage to cause some problems. But, update management isn't the only aspect of the MMD as Microsoft promises to sort out most of the issues tofree up IT resources for more important tasks.

While the MMDwas initially only introduced for Surface PCs, it appears some Dell and HP machines can now also be maintained by Microsoft under this subscription program.

List of devices supported under Microsoft Managed Desktop service

The company has recently added some Dell and HP devices in the list of supported devices (spotted by ZDNet). Microsoft does add that it "regularly evaluates devices" that are included in the service.The current list of non-Surface devices that have been approved for this program include:

Dell Latitude 5490Dell Latitude 7390 2-in-1Dell Precision 3530HP Elite x2 1013 G3HP EliteBook 840 G5HP EliteBook x360 1030 G3HP EliteBook x360 1040 G5HP EliteDesk 800 G4 DMHP EliteDesk 800 G4 SFFHP EliteOne 800 G4 23.8in AIOHP ProBook x360 440 G1

Apart from these, Microsoft also supports Surface Book 2, Surface Go, Surface Laptop, Surface Laptop 2, Surface Pro (5th Gen), and Surface Pro 6.

Under the Microsoft Managed Desktop service, the Windows maker promises to take the headache out of device maintenance, offering services likedevice configuration, security monitoring and remediation, app deployment, update management, desktop analytics, and 24x7 end-user support.

The company says "Microsoft Managed Desktop gives customers a comprehensive IT solution that delights users and frees up IT resources for more important tasks" along with makingcustomers' workplaces "more productive and secure."

"With Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD),we utilize the insights from hundreds of millions of machines in the windows ecosystemto help ensure we have a solid foundation for our service,"Bill Karagounis, General Manager of the Enterprise Mobility & Management team with the Experiences & Devices Group, said. "This means that in addition to having the right hardware components to meet MMD security lockdown and user experience needs, the device model is also meeting our reliability bar leveraging the diagnostic data mentioned above. We don't stop there. We also keep monitoring device reliability of MMD devices running in our customers' production environments to ensure that reliability is sustained given updates over time."

As noted in our initial coverage, this subscription model would certainly help Microsoft deal with some of the complaints coming from IT departments, even though it is at an added cost. The service is also in limited availability right now in the US, UK, and Australia.