Windows 10: From Distraction to Action
So you’re on a business trip. You get in line at the airport car rental desk, pick up the keys – and when you unlock the car door and get in, the driver’s seat is just right and all the mirrors are adjusted to suit you.
You drive to your regional office for a day’s work. Your assigned desk is set up like your own one back at base, all your regular speed dials are on the desk phone and there’s a mug of coffee waiting, made just the way you like it. And look, there’s your framed photo – the one you took on your last vacation. How did that get there?
OK, so all this is fanciful. You might even think it’s unnecessary. But just suppose as you’re walking up to that desk you’re on the brink of a great creative decision? If you feel out of place and you can’t see your scrap pad or work folder you’ll need to find them – and that copper-bottomed, gold-plated, platinum idea may fly straight out of your head into oblivion.
Sorry. What were you saying? Distraction is a terrible thing. In business especially, it’s a curse: there are so many demands on our time and attention, and the more we can keep them to a minimum and the easier we can make things, the more we can all achieve.
It’s this kind of thinking that’s gone into Windows 10, the most powerful operating system ever built. For a quick summary of everything it can do for you, watch this short animation – and in particular, here are a few key ways Windows 10 keeps things simple and helps make everyone in enterprise organisations more productive:
It’s the new normal – it feels familiar, with a Start menu and task bar your users will recognize. They can create Live Tiles so they can get straight to the critical information they need; they can create multiple desktops and see tasks in one view; and they can choose the input method that best suits whatever they’re doing, including touch and handwriting – even voice if they have the right hardware.
Pick up where you left off – Continuum means apps and content stay looking great as users switch between devices. Onscreen features such as menus and taskbars adapt for easy navigation, and users can switch from tablet to desktop mode whenever they want. Continuum for Phone enables people to use their Windows 10 phones like a desktop with a mouse, keyboard and monitor.
Competitive Edge – Windows 10’s new browser, Microsoft Edge, is the first to let users write or type directly onto web pages and share them with others. It has a new reading view that takes away all the clutter and optimizes the layout for the screen size being used. In countries where the Cortana digital assistant can be enabled, users can take action – for instance, make a hotel reservation – without leaving the page they’re on. And for sites that need better backward compatibility, they can automatically switch to…
…The new Explorer – Only Internet Explorer 11 offers the security, manageability, performance, backward compatibility, and modern standards support that enterprise web app portfolios need. It’s supported on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 as well as on Windows 10 and is faster than older versions. It supports modern web standards such as HTML5, CSS3 and WebGL, and provides enhanced features to keep users’ data more private and to make it harder for malicious websites to access parts of the operating system.
User simplicity is only part of it – Windows 10 makes life easier for enterprise data managers too. Who needs to optimize apps for different devices? Not you. Not anymore. You can write to one API and produce one version for every device – and you can easily exploit the capabilities of each device too, as well as build in other Windows 10 features such as Live Tiles and interactive notifications. It’s not just about development either: debugging and distributing apps are more streamlined too
OK, so having your driving position and your hot desk set up to suit you would be a good thing. They’d remove a few distractions from your day. But having all devices work the way you and your business users want to work; having powerful, smart, safe, cool and backward-compatible browser options; developing apps in one go that are optimized for every device – well, those are more than good things. Those are great.
