On Monday and Tuesday last week, Microsoft held their Washington DC Tech Summit. I attended 4 sessions:
- The Future is Closer Than You Think; Broadly Deploying Windows 10 for Business
The Windows 10 session was a convincing look at how Windows 10 could be effectively deployed and managed in the enterprise. While early Windows 10 had a heavy consumer focus, future updates are focused on the business prospective. This can be seen with the announcement of the Windows insider for business for WaaS. The Windows Insider program gives early adopting users access to Windows 10 features before they are released so they can be evaluated by the community. Crowd sourcing to IT pros is Microsoft’s next step in this program.
- How to Best Migrate, Manage and Protect Office 365
The Office 365 session was easily the most heavily attended of the day. It really justified the momentum of moving to the cloud and Office 365. TecFac excels in this area, and it was great to see the need for information, help and guidance in transitioning to the cloud.
- Explore OneDrive for Business Key Features and Roadmap
In the OneDrive session, I was further convinced how OneDrive is not ready for the business enterprise. ShareFile is a far superior product. OneDrive still has you go to two different places for personal files and shared files. Syncing is still inconsistent and slow. With ShareFile’s Drive Mapper application, it mimics a mapped drive on your computer so you’re not required to sync anything, giving you access to everything on your file share without using any space on your hard drive.
- Deploy Microsoft Office 2016 the Right Way
Moving on to the Office 2016 session, the presenters ran through the best practices for deploying the Office 2016 click to run. TecFac has been using these practices since the Office 2013 upgrades, so attending this session was pure justification of our own internal processes.