Most with the Windows 7 characteristics Microsoft has demonstrated and touted for your previous few months have already been aimed at customers, not organization customers.Sure, in the event you definitely pushed the Softies,
Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, you could get someone to admit there may possibly be a characteristic or two — like Direct Access VPN-less connectivity or Branche Cache support – that would appeal to enterprise users. But it most certainly hasn;t been a big theme for Microsoft so far.(I guess if your closest OS competitor — for those who don;t count pirated copies and older versions of Windows — is Apple, focusing the conversation around buyers instead of enterprise consumers makes sense.)On March 4, Microsoft officials shifted the Windows 7 marketing machine to the enterprise side with the house. Via a posting to the Windows Team blog, Gavriella Schuster,
Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, Microsoft Senior Director for Windows Commercial Product Management, highlighted the process and planning behind Windows 7 Enterprise.Schuster said that Microsoft spent six months analyzing enterprise trends and doing planning around how Windows 7 would address business-users; concerns before the Windows team did any coding.“We brought (just a little over 100 business-focused) prospects in during our envisioning an dplanning process,” she told me. These 100 — with whom Microsoft has shared alpha and beta product builds — include about 30 who comprise Microsoft;s Desktop Advisory Council. The DAC participants come from a wide variety of vertical industries. They are supplemented by OEMs,
Microsoft Office 2007 Professional, ISVs and about 30 Technology Adoption Program (TAP) clients who also have provided input on the enterprise characteristics for Windows seven,
Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, Schuster said. There are also a number of testers who Microsoft labels as “First Wave” program participants who are deploying Windows 7 today.Schuster attributed tweaks to policy-management, deployment tools, federated search, security and remote-access functionality in Windows seven to suggestions and advice from these customers.Microsoft has been taking a lot of heat lately for its feedback processes around Windows 7. I;m certain Schuster;s blog post was in response, in large part, to that criticism. But her post also leads me to wonder whether small business end users have found any with the new functions in early builds of Windows 7 reason enough to consider upgrading — especially in this tough economic climate.Company end users: What;s the word? Any Windows seven functions, in particular,
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, caught your fancy? If not, what would you hope to see in a future version of Windows that would win you over?