Windows 7 business case example

Only very large enterprise customers could even qualify for one, and then the cost was literally millions of dollars, as my colleague Mary Jo Foley discovered. For Windows 7, the extended support option is far more democratic. In September , Microsoft announced its plan to offer paid Windows 7 Extended Security Updates ESUs , and in October the company announced that it was extending this support to businesses of all sizes.

That escalating price schedule is intended to serve as a disincentive to Windows 7 users who might otherwise be tempted to kick the can a little further down the road. You'll also need to find a reseller that is a member of the Cloud Solution Provider program and can deliver the ESU licenses you require. As I discovered when I tried to do just that , this isn't as easy as it might sound.

Customers who have paid for Windows Software Assurance contracts or who have Windows 10 Enterprise or Education subscriptions will get a discount but will still be subject to significant price hikes in years 2 and 3. You can eliminate the extra cost of Windows 7 Extended Security Updates completely if you move your workloads to virtual machines in Microsoft's Azure cloud.

That option will be available using the new Windows Virtual Desktop option , which should be available as a preview soon. For businesses that only need to virtualize individual line-of-business applications, this could be a cost-effective option. If you don't have any compatibility issues that need to be addressed first, the simplest and most straightforward route is to put together a deployment plan and begin executing it. But the details of that plan matter, especially if you want to avoid the headaches of the "Windows as a service" model.

As always, of course, the easiest upgrade path is via hardware replacement. Any device that's five years old or more is an obvious candidate for recycling. For systems that were sold between and with Windows 8 licenses and then downgraded to Windows 7, you might be able to save some money by installing Windows 8. Doing this gets you three years of no-cost additional support, good until January 10, For businesses that choose a Windows 10 upgrade, one not-so-obvious factor to consider is which Windows 10 edition to deploy.

The default choice for most businesses is Windows 10 Pro, but I strongly suggest considering an additional upgrade to the Enterprise or Education edition.

If you encounter a compatibility issue during the upgrade, you file a support ticket and get engineering support to resolve the issue. For most businesses, the Windows Enterprise E3 and E5 subscription options are probably the easiest and most cost-effective here. It was extensively updated and republished in January Best Chromebook for students Student-proof laptops.

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The Strategy Journal. Implementing the Masterplan ex-McK. One objection you're likely to encounter is based on the lack of an in-place upgrade path from XP to Windows 7. The idea of having to "nuke and pave," wiping out XP installations and starting from scratch with a clean installation of Windows 7, has many organizations wary of the process.

However, it's not nearly as scary as some tech publications have made it out to be. Microsoft provides the User State Migration Tool USMT that you can use to preserve desktop and application settings, user accounts and users' data files, and migrate them to the new Windows 7 installation.

One of the biggest reasons companies chose not to upgrade to Vista had to do with application compatibility. They had old apps that wouldn't install or run on Vista, or that ran more slowly or unreliably on the new OS.

Using brand new integration technology, this latest version of Virtual PC allows you to run your old XP applications on XP, but they appear in your Windows 7 Start menu and on your Windows 7 desktop, fully integrated with your Windows 7 applications.

This is not your father's virtual machine technology, and it pretty much blows away any worries over application compatibility that may have been obstacles to an OS upgrade in the past. If your company is already running Windows Vista on the desktop, is there any reason to switch to Windows 7? Many companies and individual users have found the Windows 7 RTM to be faster and more stable than Vista, even after two service packs.

Microsoft designed Windows 7 with compatibility in mind, and even without using XP Mode, a significant number of older programs that didn't work on Vista will run on Windows 7. Not only will Windows 7 run apps that Vista won't, it will also run on hardware that won't support Vista. Many individual have been able to run Windows 7 on low powered machines that ran Vista unacceptably slowly or not at all. Finally, you'll still need Windows 7 if your company wants to take advantage of DirectAccess, AppLocker and BranchCache a system for caching files stored on a central server to make them more accessible to branch offices.

In the end, the decision to upgrade rests on one question: How will Windows 7 improve productivity and positively impact your company's bottom line? Changes to the user interface, from reworked versions of traditional Windows programs such as Calculator, Paint and WordPad to new GUI features such as Snap, Peek and Shake, as well as taskbar jumplists, many more keyboard shortcuts, and a new way to navigate the file system with libraries, can help end users get their work done faster, more enjoyably and with less reliance on third party applications.

Better performance means less time waiting for the system to respond, resulting in more output in a given amount of time. Better reliability means less downtime due to problems and crashes, both increasing productivity and reducing administrative and tech support overhead.