The compelling case for Windows 8

In this section of our three-part series on Microsoft’s recent Executive Briefing event, Tim Cozze-Young reports the highlights of a presentation about the enterprise benefits of Windows 8 and describes how BT, an early adopter, is using it to empower its engineers.

One of the standout themes of the Microsoft’s Enterprise Briefing on 7 November was the benefit of Windows 8 in the enterprise. Erwin Visser, Director for Windows at Microsoft gave compelling ‘show me, don’t tell me’ demos of features in Windows 8 that have real value for large companies:

• Applications that use the new Start menu and Live Tiles such as business applications from the Dutch Public Prosecutions Service and National Rail
• Windows To Go, which puts Windows 8 on a memory stick and lets you boot from that; perfect for contractors or as a backup for travellers. He even pulled the memory stick out of the demo machine and then replugged and it carried on as if nothing had happened.
• Enhanced security such as trusted boot which he showed automatically cleaning up a rootkit infection.
• Desktop virtualisation with support for touch and USB cameras and other peripherals.

These benefits were brought to life by Peter Scott, Director End User Technology at BT, an early adopter of Windows 8. He described how the company had equipped around 3,000 engineers with Windows 8 laptops that folded into flat tablets.

BT deploys small, simple applications that use the Start menu and live tiles to make engineers more productive. For example, there’s an app that engineers can use to mark a job as closed and finished.

Another application caches company news from the intranet and displays in on the Start screen. Staff can read the whole article right in the app by tapping on it. The whole thing is authenticated, encrypted and locally cached but only took a few hours to write.

In short, BT is already finding that Windows 8 “gives you engineers the right tools for the job” making them faster and more productive. And that’s really the whole point.

by Tim Cozze-Young
Audience Marketing Manager, Microsoft Enterprise Team

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 20, 2012
  I want my start menu back!!!!***@###

• Anonymous
  November 25, 2012
  Hi, Moving the mouse to the bottom left of the screen brings up the start screen, and a right click on that image will bring up the start panel. In addition, when you are on the Start Home page, just type in the name of an application or programme and the search function will locate it.

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2013
  I would strongly disagree about the strength of Windows 8 in the enterprise. First off there is the networking aspect.  There is no longer a way to set a single broadband connection infrastructure FOR THE DEVICE - now every user of the device has to have THEIR OWN NETWORK CONNECTION.... this is just plain stupid.   I understand where the idea came from - that UserIds map to different connections, but this re-authentication becomes a nightmare for a Road Warrior then there is the inability to do "side by side" editing/reading of Windows 8 UX/MX apps.  Sure you can have one app in "sidebar/docked" mode and the second app taking up 2/3 of the screen.  But that's a PITA to set up.  Compare that to say "Open Doc 1, Open Doc 2, Arrange All"  in Word 2010...   while I love building tablet apps for Windows 8 - the "desktop" experience is really awful

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2013
  Yes Howie, moving the mouse to edges of the screen does do what you suggest.  it also means that all sorts of weird and unpredictable things happen when you jostle your mouse or jiggle it to find the mouse pointer etc.