Unified in every way
Except when it comes to naming things...
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 …
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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".
"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.
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
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?)
@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.)
@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.
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!
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.
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.
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.