2020 has been a crazy year — there is no question about that. Suddenly having to switch to all of your employees working from home sent the vast majority of organizations scrambling, causing utter chaos. In fact, "companies spent an additional $15 billion a week on technology during the first wave of the pandemic, to ensure that employees could work from home safely," according to TechRepublic.
For the past five years (since the introduction of Windows-as-a-Service in 2015), we have talked about the necessity and benefits of Evergreen IT Management for enterprises. While both of those are still as relevant and crucial as before, there are new prevalent trends that will have a long-term impact on your Evergreen IT strategy. Today, I want to discuss the three most impactful ones: COVID-19 and the wide-spread adoption of remote work, Everything as Code (EaC), and Microsoft's Windows Virtual Desktop.
"Work-From-Home" (WFH) or "Work-From-Anywhere" (WFA) quickly became the new standard when countries went on lockdown in March due to the global pandemic of COVID-19. Despite an initial scrambling to get employees set up for remote work, companies are now starting to question the amount of physical office space and business trips needed in the future as employees were still productive at home.
Since its release last year, Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) has been gaining traction across multiple organizations, mainly those looking to provide a better user experience for their employees, have the latest security and feature updates, and reduce costs across their IT environment. Especially since March, WVD has become a solution that organizations started looking at for their company's needs as most of the global workforce had to suddenly work from home.
Despite improving app compatibility, application packaging is still a time-consuming, manual labor-intensive, and expensive obstacle organizations have to overcome. One reason is the ever-increasing number and complexity of applications within organizations, but more and more, the pace at which apps have to be packaged, tested, and deployed to keep pace with the velocity of change within the organization is becoming a huge roadblock.
With the release of Windows 10 2004 a few weeks ago and with MSIX AppAttach in public preview, Microsoft will soon start to incentivize customers to move to its new installer technology for Windows, MSIX. MSIX is set to replace the very popular Windows Installer (MSI) and the APPX packaging format that were previously used for Microsoft Store apps.
In the past 12 months, we looked at MSIX readiness for adoption (back in December 2018, I said it would start being ready for enterprise adoption in mid-2020) as well as laid out Access Capture's strategic roadmap to MSIX, which talked about Access Capture being able to automate the conversion of your legacy MSI and AppV apps to MSIX by Q4/2020.
Currently, MSIX can be used by devices running Windows 10 1803 and up, but what happens if you are still running some Windows 10 1709 or lower in your estate? That is where MSIX Core comes in!
Most IT executives and IT project managers instinctively know that Evergreen IT is the only way forward for managing increasingly complex IT landscapes that change faster than ever before. And while they also know this new management approach comes with numerous benefits, they often cannot place their finger on what exactly they can expect to gain. This is not surprising, as this is a new concept without many real-world results and insights publicly available.
Almost every organization is scrambling right now to get employees set up to work from home — bringing many Windows 10 migration projects temporarily to a halt. While the current pandemic might possibly result in support deadline extensions from Microsoft down the road, it is important to be aware of an emerging problem that almost every company will encounter: what happens when your migration is over?
Many organizations who have completed their migration have encountered the very common pitfall of the chaos created when the migration project team passes the reins to the Business-as-Usual (BAU) team who is expected to proceed as always.
2020 is a critical year for enterprises. Windows 7 went end-of-life and into paid extended support in January, and Office 2010 is going end-of-life in October, with no extended support, paid or otherwise, leaving organizations with their hands full.
With getting all your users migrated as soon as possible, you really do not need anything that can cause any lagging, incompatibility, display issues, and outright frustration for your users. To help with that, I want to make you aware of several Excel issues that you can encounter whether or not you are migrating away from Office 2010, or are already on a later on-premise version. So, let's get right to it.
If I would take the conversations I have with our clients, prospects, and partners as an indication, I would say that about 90% of enterprise IT teams are interested in Evergreen IT, but maybe only about 20% of them fully grasp the concept enough to know how to practically implement it. And it is an ambiguous concept unless you take the time to research it. This is made harder by the fact that, besides very few information sources, there isn't much information out there.