If you find yourself forced to work in a Windows 7 environment but need or would like access to some Windows 10 features it turns out there is at least one way that I've stumbled accross which has worked for me.
As far as free options that are well supported in Windows 7 Oracle Virtual Box seemed to be the best option I could find. If you go this route make sure to enable virtualization in the BIOS of your system to enable installing a 64-bit guest OS.
Windows 10 can be installed initially without activation. What I did was to download the Media Creation Tool and created an ISO that I could load into the virtual optical drive in Virtual Box as my installation media.
If your original Windows 7 license is for Enterprise edition instead of Professional you will need to upgrade edition first. What worked for me was to use one of the public KMS client setup keys.
If you don't have your Windows 7 license handy such as on a sticker on the machine or within the product booklet you can use the following VBScript file which will extract the necessary information and display it in a message box. Note, that if you use the Ctrl-C keyboard shortcut it will copy the text content of the message box to your clipboard so you can avoid typing it in yourself.
https://gist.github.com/eyecatchup/d577a2628666a0ad1375
Once you have your Windows 7 product key handy you can change change your current product key to this one in the System menu and activate your copy of windows.