How the plan is built
The planner works backward from your deadline. It reserves two weeks of preparation (three for a fleet of a thousand devices or more): pull the device list from your inventory tool, decide which machines are retiring, book the disposition vendor, and put the paperwork in place, including the certificate of insurance and, for health data, a business associate agreement. An optional one-week pilot runs the whole loop at one site, from swap to certificate, before you scale. Production waves then run in two-week blocks at the pace you entered, a sweep collects the stragglers and the mail-back kits from remote staff, and a two-week closeout reconciles every serial to a certificate. If the finish lands after your target date, the planner tells you the weekly pace you would need instead.
The single most useful habit it builds in is retiring old equipment on the same visit new equipment arrives. Devices that wait in a storeroom for a later pickup are the ones that go missing, lose resale value, and turn up in an incident.
School districts can use the same plan for Chromebook carts: set the deadline to the model’s update-expiration date or the summer collection, and see the K-12 Chromebook end-of-life brief for the deprovisioning steps.
The Windows 10 deadlines
Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025. For organizations, Microsoft’s commercial Extended Security Updates come in yearly terms (year one through October 13, 2026; year two through October 12, 2027; year three through October 10, 2028), and the per-device price doubles each year. The consumer extension Microsoft announced in June 2026 does not cover managed business devices. ESU is a bridge for the machines that genuinely can’t move yet, so make the decision per device class and retire the rest on a schedule. The ESU cliff analysis walks through the options, and the Enterprise Refresh Playbook covers running a refresh end to end.
Each wave in your plan ends the same way: data-bearing devices sanitized or destroyed to NIST SP 800-88 with a serialized certificate, and those certificates reconciled to your asset list. Use the Method Picker to set the method per media type and the Certificate Checker to confirm the records will hold up.