Day two at Microsoft TechEd 2012 was all about Windows 8. CIO.com caught up with Windows corporate VP Antoine Leblond, who discussed why CIOs should test Windows 8, why developers should love it, and why we'll all be touching our laptop screens sooner than we think.
The Windows 8 Release Preview, available as of May 31, is one of the last steps before the new OS launches "for the holidays", to quote a company blog post by Windows president Steven Sinofsky.
Try as it will to break through in the mobile space, Microsoft is still struggling to gain any ground with Windows Phone almost a year-and-a-half after its launch.
Ultrabooks, a term coined by Intel, gave name to the increasingly thin, light, fast and (relatively) cheap Windows laptops popping up over the last year in reaction to the Apple MacBook Air and the iPad-led tablet craze.
The steady influx and slow acceptance of mobile devices and apps in the workplace has liberated users once locked into Blackberrys and Windows laptops. But with this new freedom comes a burden on IT to manage and secure devices and apps.
This Saturday, Jan. 28, is Data Privacy Day. DPD, as it's known, is a day to "increase awareness of privacy and data protection issues among consumers, organizations and government officials and help industry, academia, and advocates to highlight consumer privacy efforts."
While 2011 was not a breakthrough year for Microsoft products, the company held steady amid criticism regarding its absence from the tablet market, its late arrival to the cloud, and low sales for Windows Phones.
The Apple iPad was only released 18 months ago, but the swift proliferation of the tablet PC is already changing the way businesses think about user productivity.
Windows Intune, Microsoft's Web-based PC management and security platform, may not get the same level of attention as cloud services like Office 365 or Windows Azure, but Microsoft is betting big on Intune to be the cloud service that will facilitate IT's evolving job of remotely managing PCs.
In a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, Google CIO Ben Fried penned an ode to letting go.
A majority of enterprises have migrated to Windows 7 or are planning to do so. But for Windows XP holdouts ready to side-step Windows 7 for the upcoming Windows 8 OS, you are risking a gap in support, stresses research firm Gartner in a new "first take" analysis of Windows 8 migration in the enterprise.
The 'consumerisation of IT' may be an overused phrase, but it is by no means a fad. Workers nationwide are coming to expect that personal devices will connect to corporate networks.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Cisco, take notice: Despite the near-constant hype about cloud computing services, most mid-market companies are still viewing cloud as a complement, not a replacement.
Your IT department may be armed with bright and ambitious employees, but that doesn't mean the group will be efficient.
Hewlett-Packard's announcement that it is discontinuing its TouchPad set off a $99 fire sale. But without HP's full attention and support from developers, these devices won't live long. However, they can still be useful even after they're useless as a tech device. Here are some ideas.