I saw on another forum site, MacRumors, that with P11 you have to have Cortana, whether you like it or not. Can anybody confirm that Cortana is a built-in 'feature' of P11. If so then there is no upgrade path for me at the moment ... and within a couple of years I will be having to use an alternative purveyor of VM software. Thanks.
Cortana is a Microsoft application which is available only for Windows 10. As any other Windows program, it's optional to use. Parallels Desktop 11 provides with the functionality to use Cortana in Windows VMs and Mac OS side - but once again, this is completely optional whether you use it or not.