14 DAY TRIAL // Just as it was the case with Windows Vista, Microsoft will offer a select edition of Windows 7 to its Software Assurance customers via Volume Licensing. In this regard, Gavriella Schuster, senior director, Product Management for Windows Client, emphasized that Windows 7 contained many of the lessons that the Redmond company had learned with Windows Vista. In this regard, Schuster stated that Windows 7 spent a total of six months just in planning stage, as the team building analyzed end-to-end business scenarios in order to ensure that the operating system would be able to deliver all that enterprise customers wanted. At the same time, with Windows 7, Microsoft is delivering predictability, as the operating system will be made available three years after Vista. And last, but not least, the software giant served early development milestones of Windows 7 to partners well ahead of Beta Build 7000.
“Our qualitative outreach consisted of over 100 of our top customers through five programmatic engagement vehicles. Desktop Advisory Council: Twenty-seven active IT leaders across a variety of industries including some of the world’s largest manufacturers, banks, insurers, telecoms, energy companies and professional services firms. OEM Engagement: Leading manufacturers from around the world. Ecosystem Engagement: Members of the Windows Ecosystem Readiness Program received access to builds and toolkits for Windows 7. Technology Adoption Program: Strictly engineering-focused, customers in TAP committed a large investment of their time and resources in test deployments of Beta and pre-Beta code,” Schuster said.
The First Wave Program is the fifth engagement vehicle. At this point in time there are already Microsoft partners that are in the progress of introducing Windows 7, in Beta stage in their environments. From this set of partners, the Redmond company looks to understand the actual experience of deploying Windows 7 at an enterprise level. Of course that the software giant is also conducting Quantitative Research in addition to Qualitative Outreach, having tapped no less than 4,000 customers around the world for input.
“56% said they needed help protecting corporate data on laptops. This validated our decision to include BitLocker in Windows 7 Enterprise, and to extend its capabilities to the portable hard drives that can be just as dangerous and more loosely monitored than laptops. 61% expressed a deep concern about ensuring their users install and use only authorized applications (for fear of security breaches from unauthorized applications). This helped prioritize our plan to develop AppLocker. 49% wanted to make it easier for remote workers to access corporate resources, bubbling a plan up for Direct Access capabilities,” Schuster added.
The promise from Microsoft is that Windows 7 will make users productive independent of their actual location at a higher level than Vista. At the same time, the focus is to boost security and control for Windows 7, while making sure that PC management is streamlined as much as possible.