Windows 8 in the Corporate Environment

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.