BMS Blog: SBS Consulting in the UK

A quick reminder for anyone who may have missed it. Wednesday 4th November at 16:30 is the first of the Technical School Live Meetings.

Jamie Burgess will present around Windows 7 and the new features and benefits. Even if you’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now I’m sure Jamie will have something new you’ve not seen before, so if you haven’t already done so please remember to sign up now.

4^th November: 16.30-1745: Technical School: Windows 7

Register for the event at:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032427531&culture=en-GB

Look forward to seeing you all on Wednesday!

As Windows 7 is released for general availability I thought it was time to reflect on the road BMS and our customers have travelled down since we were chosen to participate in the Windows 7 Ignite program back at the beginning of the year.

It seems like a long time ago now when I caught a flight over to Munich for the kick off Windows 7 Ignite event.

Since then we have seen Windows 7 progress through early beta versions to an incredibly fast and stable release candidate and finally to the RTM (released to manufacturing) code we have today.

Working with Microsoft during  the development of Windows 7 has given BMS and our customers an incredible insight into how the Microsoft machine works. From the early beta release to the RTM version it is truly amazing how the momentum has slowly built until the official launch at WPC09.

Being able to get back together with some of the Microsoft Ignite team at WPC09 for a celebratory dinner was the icing on the cake for me and I’m pleased to have been a part of the program. I’m still working with some of the same marketing team from Microsoft on another program at the moment called the Office 2010 Real Life Business program, more of that in future blog posts!

During the Ignite program we and our customers undertook various case studies to promote Windows 7 and you can view some of those using the links below:

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/Windows7forBusiness/sb.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/partner/resources/Default.aspx?searchText=bms&category=&products=0da69848-c78c-453b-93d1-3cd7dcc1c5af&pageIndex=0&pageSize=5&sortID=1

Microsoft have definitely got it right with Windows 7. It is hard to capture exactly what it is about it that excites users but  it can be summed up in the words of one of our customers who took part in the Ignite program:

Now I’ve got Windows 7 on my PC you couldn’t prise it out of my cold dead hands!

Enough said really!

I never thought it would happen (go knows I’ve resisted it so far)but eventually I have taken the plunge and joined the Twitter community!

I didn’t want to but it seems everyone I know uses it and the final straw was when I found out there are discussions around the Windows 7 Ignite program which I was missing out on, so if you want to know what I had for breakfast and other earth shatteringly important things like that please feel free to seek me out on Twitter under the guise of stevewright_bms

I’ve just got back from 4 days at the Microsoft Windows 7 Ignite program in Munich. The Ignite program is all about getting the ball rolling and generating excitement around the forthcoming release of Microsoft’s new operating system as well as getting feedback and real world use information about the product from partners and nominated customers.

We were very lucky to be among 4 UK and 26 other Microsoft EMEA partners from around the world invited to take part in the event. The US and Canada had taken part in a similar event last week.

We flew out on Tuesday morning and I caught up with Richard Tubb of Netlink IT on the way in to Birmingham airport to catch the flight. Rarely have I experienced an easier travelling experience as we merely got off the plane at Munich, jumped straight on to the S8 train which dropped us off within 2 minutes walk of the hotel entrance – excellent!

The first evening was spent at a cocktail reception but to be honest I only remember the beer, wine and excellent food. We were introduced to Ivonne Perrig of Microsoft and Jerry Honeycutt who were to be our presenters for the upcoming presentations and also met up with the other two UK partners Guy Gregory from Peak Support and Neil Crowther of NCI Technologies.

The 2 day presentation was split in to 2 main parts: Technical demonstrations of Windows 7 itself including IE8 and presentations around how the data and partner/customer evidence collection would work.

Now the course is over we will be receiving 2 laptops for our own use and 2 laptops each for our 4 pre-nominated customers each pre-loaded with Windows 7 and Office 2007. During the course of the following months we will all use the laptops on a daily basis and feedback information on how things go in the form of surveys, telephone interviews and by submitting reports via Microsoft Connect.

My immediate impression of Windows 7 is the no nonsense approach it takes to letting you get things done. It’s all about productivity. Right from start up (which is surprisingly quick) it looks like it means business. In Vista a lot of the features and functions were designed to make life better and easier for the admins, in Windows 7 they’re all about making things easier and more productive for the end user. Gone is the annoying sidebar (although you can still have gadgets floating freely anywhere on your desktop). Services that only start when needed really help the experience immediately after logon as you can start working straight away. The new action centre means you aren’t continually bugged by annoying pop ups all the time. The annoying UAC prompts can now be controlled granularly to allow much less interference. Aero Snap and Aero Shake are 2 cool features which at first seem quirky but are really quite useful once you get used to them.

There’s a whole load of other features I haven’t covered here but Richard has lots more detail on the event and some pics he took  you can view over on Flickr.