Taming Windows As A Service - Making The Incompatible Compatible...

With so much IT focus on the cloudy landscape, it’s easy to forget that what is happening at the desktop is still the touchy-feely point of IT contact for the users themselves.

And much of that still revolves around Microsoft and the age-old Windows platform. Except that, with Windows 10, Microsoft has forever changed the Windows landscape, it now being provided as Windows as a Service. This fundamentally changes the ongoing ownership of an estate of Windows-based endpoints, not least that Microsoft releases two features updates a year – the first to screw the platform and the second to fix it -)))) Well, sort of… Regardless, what it means is that, every time there’s an update, there are possible compatibility and compliance issues, that simply won’t resolve themselves without due analysis and remediation.

But this is not a trivial operation, especially with a large application estate. The old cliché about sufficient monkeys and typewriters producing the complete works of Shakespeare is actually complete drivel (though Measure For Measure isn’t actually that good anyway), and the same applies to an IT team and compatibility testing. There simple isn’t enough time between updates to manually test and remediate issues. End of.

So, recently I’ve been working with a UK vendor, Rimo3 – https://rimo3.com/ which has developed a cost-effective, timely alternative – ACTIV – using automation to massively reduce those test and remediation times. And it works. Moreover, the company is looking at VDI and virtualised environments in the same way, so a complete desktop estate could be managed in an automated fashion. What’s key about all this is that we’re not talking about some fanciful future solution for a potential problem, but something which resolves a major problem that exists right now. Can a company – at least of a given size – really manage its product portfolio manually, especially when it probably doesn’t even know the extent of that portfolio in the first place? You’d be amazed how few companies really know just how many applications are in their estate. Most don’t even get it close…

Anyway – enough jabbering on – don’t want to get in the way of Black Friday Christmas shopping, so check out the report itself to fully appreciate the scale of what is being achieved here:

https://rimo3.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Broadband_Testing_Rimo3_ACTIV_Report.pdf