The compelling case for Windows 8

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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