I personally made the investment and use 8.1 from my corporate workstation, though there isn't a current plan to roll out Windows 8.x to our end users. An Executive purchased
a Surface tablet that we were tasked to support, and though we try to enforce a
position of remote workers using company issued equipment, this is not yet corporate
policy. This has led me to encountering
an end user who knew more about their OS than I, that is before I personally
and professionally migrated to 8.x. I believe as IT professionals, we should
always be one or two steps ahead of those who seek our leadership and support.
There is a preponderance of negative opinion regarding
8.x from those who have not really taken the time to first hand vet 8.x within
their corporate environment. Some IT professionals are weighing in who presently
have yet to make the jump from Windows XP on their own workstation.
I have become quite fond of 8.1, and more productive.
Some of my IT colleagues went from poking fun at my early adoption, to now
entertaining adopting it themselves after seeing how I put it to use. Here are a
few of my own observations...
1). More Productive
a). I use three monitors
connected to the same desktop. It feels like I work with three separate
computers working in conjunction with one another. It shows in how I am able to
produce (this could easily be another two paragraph discussion regarding
Windows Snap and multiple monitor use).
2). Performance
a). Boots much faster.
b). Handles much better
programs or drivers that lose their mind. (Typically with a somewhat more graceful
reboot to a state with the offending program or driver uninstalled).
3). Modern UI
Yep, that which has been the
bane to so many has been good for me. It enables you to group your programs in categories
(like the 3rd party program 'Windows Fences').
All of my Administrator Tools are grouped, and with a simply right-click
I can launch as a different user (namely my admin account).
4). Interface, Network Operability
and Cultural Adoption
I agree, the interface and
operability is a big jump from Windows X. If that's an issue one could simply
configure 8.x to boot to the desktop instead of the Modern UI (as of Windows
8.1). Working from the 8.1 desktop is not such a big jump. Just right click on
the Windows start button to perform such takes as searching (it can search
simultaneously the desk and the Internet).
I would recommend that your IT
department first adopt the product for two to three months (with ongoing active
discussions regarding use and adoption) before committing to rolling it out to
the masses.
There will probably be some
items you will need to address within your environment. For instance, we
currently use a script from SysVol to map network drives upon login. Windows 8.1 delays scripts from SysVol to run
for 5 minutes. At first, I thought 8.1 busted my drive mapping. This is by design,
and actually discovered Microsoft preferred practice is to have drive mapping
deployed via Group Policy. Also, out of the many of servers that I remote into,
I noticed that one of them doesn't completely log me out properly, I would have
to do so by resetting via a different account. For this one server in
particular, I first remote into a different RDP server, then remote over to the
server. It's the only Windows 2008 server in which I have an issue. I also had
an issue were I upgraded a 6 year old laptop to Windows 8.0. Everything worked
fine, as a matter of fact faster, but when I took it to 8.1, the wireless
adapter no longer functioned and I couldn't find a driver for it.
One need only look no further
than Windows Server 2012 (and the recently released Windows Server 2012 R2), to
realize that Microsoft is fully committed in moving with the 8.x 'experience'.
Though we might have until 2020 before extended support concludes for Windows
7, Microsoft has already stopped shipping Windows 7 and mainstream support ends
January 2015.
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