back to article Microsoft wants to lure biz users with fondleable Windows 8.1 'Apportals'

Microsoft is once again trying to convince businesses to get on board with its touch-centric computing vision, with the introduction of a new tool called Windows Apportals. Billed as a way to "integrate your entire Line of Business (LOB) stack into a single, modern, touch-based experience," Apportals allow companies to build …

  1. Bush_rat
    Facepalm

    Unified in every way

    Except when it comes to naming things...

  2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    Reminds me of putting Lipstick on a pig

    Underneath it is still a Pig.

    1. TheOtherHobbes

      Re: Reminds me of putting Lipstick on a pig

      More of a GM FrankenPig with four heads, too many trotters, and a worryingly deep voice.

      But at least it's been painted in a pleasing selection of very bright colours.

  3. Khaptain Silver badge

    They are doing it again

    Wll someone at Microsoft please listen to the following

    Please stop trying to dictate how we work........Each of us is different and we need to do things in our own personalized manner......We already have links, icons, menus, shortcuts, favorites etc in order that we can organize our work, we don't need this silly method that you are proposing, leave it to us to decide.

    In 20 years of IT I have never seen 2 people organise their desktop in the same manner, why would MS think that suddenly that is going to change... There are some very intelligent people at MS but why have they assigned the absurd, strange and weird ones to the W8 interface design team.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They are doing it again

      +1

      Might as well tell us all to arrange the items on our desks exactly the same, dress in identical clothes, comrade. A bit of freedom to customise your working experience goes a long way towards being happier at work, and happy employees are more productive.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: They are doing it again

        "And because admins control what's in an Apportal and where, users can't muck them up"

        Ah yes, the Authoritarian Model of IT. If users can "muck things up" then it speaks volumes of what a mess IT still is. I know that computers are very complex things but I still think we've failed somewhere along the line. For instance, wouldn't it be nice if the OS itself provided a global Ctrl-Z Undo facility? How many times have you done something, only to find there's no obvious way to find out what are the ramifications, or how to reverse it, or maybe you accidentally clicked the wrong thing and don't know what happened but you'd really like to reverse it for peace of mind?

        Please don't just dismiss that as "just too difficult", because that's part of the problem. Plenty of difficult things are well worth trying to achieve.

        There must be better ways to relieve the burden of IT support from users' mistakes than simply locking everything down and treating everyone like children.

        1. dan1980

          Re: They are doing it again

          "There must be better ways to relieve the burden of IT support from users' mistakes than simply locking everything down and treating everyone like children."

          Maybe, but so long as this is an added option available for sysadmins to use I don't see what the problem is. I'm with Khaptain, above, give us choice in how we do things. While I think each version of Windows has removed choice, this decision adds it.

          Is it a brilliant idea? No. Could MS have used their time to do other, more important development? Sure. But you don't have to use it and it doesn't take anything away from what is already there.

          Ever since MS made it so much more difficult to deploy custom start menus in Windows 7/2008 R2 (compared to XP/2003), I've been hoping they'd bring this back. In XP/2003 all you had to do is point the start menu to a network folder via GPO and it "just worked".

          And, well, some bosses do want users treated like children so, while that policy may be debatable, it's good to have the tools to do it, should we be asked.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: They are doing it again

          Was thinking the same the other day. Some sort of time-shifting like Sky+ would be great on PC's for support reasons. Break something - just drag a bar up from the bottom and whizz back to 2 minutes ago before you made your boob.

          I imagine I'd be long retired before something like that were possible.

    2. G R Goslin

      Re: They are doing it again

      There's an old saying, which is probably not that old, that the intelligence of a committee is the intelligence of it's dimmest member, and since MS is prone to design by committee, you get this result.

      1. Nuke
        Meh

        @G R Goslin - Re: They are doing it again

        Wrote :- "There's an old saying ... that the intelligence of a committee is the intelligence of it's dimmest member

        The version I prefer is that the intelligence of a committee is the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals of all the members' intelligencies (same formula as resistors in parallel - lower than any one of them). I have come away from meetings where everyone thinks a collective decision was stupid but was accepted because it was the only one which no-one flatly opposed.

        Yet companies like mine still bang on about needing "to work as a team".

    3. jinx3y

      Re: They are doing it again

      "Please stop trying to dictate how we work..."

      ...unless we're allowed to use an Apple product...

  4. Roland6 Silver badge

    Not a customised Start screen

    "Clicking on the Apportal tile on the Start Screen brings up the Apportal screen, and each Apportal can have multiple, nested screens that users can navigate like folders."

    So the only change to the Win8 Start screen is a new App, that just like many other app's is buried somewhere on the start screen, that delivers functionality that probably any third-party like Stardock could of delivered.

    As an Enterprise I want to control the Win8 Start screen directly.

    1. Anonymous Custard

      Re: Not a customised Start screen

      So it's basically like the existing WP "Kid's Corner" *, except locked down even more, so they obviously think minions and drones are less capable of organising things (or more capable of disorganising them) than kids?

      * Their positioning of the apostrophe rather than mine, as for me it is incorrect but YMMV

  5. IT Drone

    Welcome to the 21st century...

    Desktop PCs in the enterprise? Really? Instead go thin client to give users a follow-me-anywhere, server-based virtual desktop experience. MS Windows Server doesn't look like a Windows 8 kiddy-tiles desktop rather a more enterprise-friendly Windows 7 desktop with a proper Start menu and all. Training issues? No. Software compatibility issues? Nope. (Windows 8.1 - a futile attempt at turd polishing? Roll on Windows 9?)

    1. dan1980

      Re: Welcome to the 21st century...

      @IT Drone

      Unless, of course, you're running Server 2012/2012R2 on the back-end, which very much does look like Windows 8/8.1 with ''kiddy-tiles".

      Windows 2008R2 looks like Windows 7, 2012 looks like 8 and 2012 R2 looks like 8.1. This is one of my chief gripes with the new OSs - why the hell is my server OS modeled on a phone interface?

      Yes, not having personalised desktop PCs is a great idea - I agree (not in all circumstances, of course). But it's not accurate to imply that simply switching to a server OS changes the interface from what it would be in the desktop equivalent. If you're talking about deploying an older version of the Server OS then fine but you could also deploy an older version of the desktop OS and avoid the "kiddy-tiles". (Of which I a not a fan.)

      1. The Real Tony Smith
        Linux

        Re: Welcome to the 21st century...

        Your server OS has a graphical interface?

        Why?

        1. jinx3y

          Re: Welcome to the 21st century...

          because 90% of business can't afford overpriced Linux server admins

        2. dan1980

          Re: Welcome to the 21st century...

          @The Real Tony Smith

          "Your server OS has a graphical interface? Why?"

          Because I thought we were discussing @IT Drone's statement:

          "Instead go thin client to give users a follow-me-anywhere, server-based virtual desktop experience. MS Windows Server doesn't look like a Windows 8 kiddy-tiles desktop rather a more enterprise-friendly Windows 7 desktop with a proper Start menu and all."

          I assume he was, when talking about servers, describing Terminal Server/RDS. If you think a CLI-only interface is a good fit for that then be my guest!

          My point was simply that comparing the interface on 8/8.1 to 2008R2 is not really proof that a server OS GUI is better, as the equivalent server OS is 2012/R2, which looks the same as 8/8.1.

  6. Paul Shirley

    still the user gets no control

    Wonder if this will be the first windows desktop that actually stays how your it dept sets it, instead of randomly rearranging itself at will. Even if it works users still won't have control of their own environment though the power crazed alien responsible will be a little easier to hunt down and smack!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    sounds just the thing (caution, post may contain satire)

    for those organizations where the workers have become a little too attached to their computers in a proprietal way and need to be reminded whose assets they are and that they are "in it for the duration".

    Any resemblance between a well-run business with comprehensive IT policies and that scene in Metropolis is purely coincidental.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    nightmare material

    I read this and had a horrible feeling the market might embrace this shit and then we all have to use it, all the time.

    I honestly prefer the Windows 3.1 gui. I'm not being dramatic, I really do.

  9. Mikel

    Try fermented chicken livers.

    It is more tempting bait.

  10. Peter Stone

    What next?

    Micrisift are trying to lure businesses to use Windows 8.1, which businesses seem to be resisting & staying with Windows 7. My thought for a long time has been, what will businesses do when the next version of Windows comes out, & Windows 7 gets eol.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What next?

      It's funny, all MS need to do to get both business and consumers is release the Windows 8 kernel and driver support with the Windows 7 shell.

      And that's it... business will start buying licenses, and consumers will walk into pc world and not see row after row of unusable touch screen crap.

      Sure, MS can add metro-in-normal-window support and anything else that allows them to think that the last several years haven't been wasted, but that's it.

  11. mrfill
    Meh

    Congratulations...

    ...to Microsoft on the birth of your new word.

    Must have taken a trained bollocksmith ages to come up with that.

  12. Fenton

    Marketing & scope

    MS have gone about this all wrong.

    Desktop mode should have stayed the same (aka win 7), with Metro as an optional shell.

    And the Marketing, they should have taken that scene from Avatar where they are viewing something on a big screen and swiped the image to a mobile device.

    Now if a surface automatically switched to a desktop mode when docked to a decent monitor and switch back to mobile view when un-docked it could be a great device, mistake was going ARM I guess.

    1. jinx3y

      Re: Marketing & scope

      they probably don't have enough "room to breathe", considering that Apple will sue them for patent infringement if they use they wrong color and shape combination with tiles...or some other silliness

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