2009-03-05
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Microsoft has provided additional guidance to enterprises on the value of its upcoming Windows 7 operating system.
In a March 4 blog post, Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft's senior director of product management for Windows Client, laid out some more of the company's positioning around Windows 7 for enterprise users.
Said Schuster:
"There’s been a lot of talk in the community about what Windows 7 offers consumers. Today, I’d like to highlight the enterprise value of the product and how it reflects what customers and partners told us enterprises need most."
Schuster noted some of the recent flap regarding feedback from
Windows 7 testers and Microsoft's Windows 7 engineering team. "With
Windows Vista, we learned a lot about how involved our customers and
partners like to be in the development of an OS – in a nutshell, early
and often," she said. "With Windows 7, we changed the way we developed
the Windows OS in order to be more responsive to that feedback." In a Feb. 25 blog post, Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group at Microsoft, addressed the issue of feedback from the beta testing community and Microsoft's interaction with the community. Schuster's post is an adjunct to the Sinofsky post, but with more of
an enterprise focus. Indeed, Schuster said research as well as
development on the new operating system continues. "Research on Windows
7 overall continues today as we receive feedback from our beta
testers," she said. "We’ve received over 500,000 Send Feedback reports
on Windows 7 Beta. Thanks to our dedicated customers, we have hundreds
of fixes in the pipeline. This is a testament to how we’re taking your
feedback and inputting it directly into Windows 7." Discussing the enterprise nature of Windows 7, Schuster said: "Windows 7 Enterprise mirrors what we learned during our planning
and research phase and resulted in three big areas of investment: Moreover, Schuster said Microsoft did qualitative research with more
than 100 of its top customers, and quantitative research with nearly
4,000 customers in developing and emerging markets. The quantitative research brought out three main areas of concern:
risk management, compliance and mobility, Schuster said. Key findings
included that 56 percent of those surveyed 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," Schuster said. In addition, 61 percent of those surveyed 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," Schuster said.
And. "Forty-nine percent wanted to make it easier for remote
workers to access corporate resources, bubbling a plan up for Direct
Access capabilities, she said. Meanwhile, in an earlier post, Schuster gave organizations guidance on how to make sense of the Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 dilemma.
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