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Jun

30

Windows 7 Gives Feeding America More Time

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Hello, I’m Olivia Riley Cornejo, and starting today I’ll be blogging about the experiences some of our commercial customers (large and small) are having in their Windows 7 deployments. Hopefully their stories will help answer questions you may be having about migrating to Windows 7 in your own environment and inspire you to try it for yourself. Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter @ORCornejo.

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The first customer I’d like to highlight is Feeding America, a hunger-relief charity with food banks across the United States. I’m sure you’ve heard of the amazing work they do to help feed millions of people every year. As you can imagine, this great work also has the potential to be quite challenging logistically without the right equipment. The organization turned to Windows 7 to help maximize productivity and give employees more time to focus on their job instead of focusing on how they’ll do their jobs.

With more than 4,000 employees across a network of over 200 food banks and a national office, Feeding America can’t afford to be bogged down with endless IT issues. With Windows 7’s ease of use, Feeding America can focus on what really matters – getting food to people in need. The Feeding America team tells me that Windows 7 has been easy for employees to understand quickly, and the IT department doesn’t receive a lot of “how do I do this?” questions. The collective favorite feature is Snap – Feeding America employees like being able to compare documents side by side.

Patrick Whalen, the IT Infrastructure Manager for Feeding America, is pleased with the deployment and loving the benefits of Windows 7:

I absolutely recommend Windows 7 for other non-profit organizations. It doesn’t have needy hardware requirements and can run on older machines so it’s very affordable.

Because the reception and deployment have been so successful, Feeding America just received approval to deploy Windows 7 across 20 additional food banks next year. Here at Microsoft, we’re hoping that having the latest and greatest in technology will really allow them to be as efficient as possible and help even more people.

Especially right now, it’s more important than ever to donate to Feeding America with kids out of school for the summer and some not getting the full meals they received during the school year. I just donated online and it takes less than a minute!

To learn more about Feeding America’s deployment experience with Windows 7, read Microsoft’s case study.

Jun

30

Research Study Reports Business Value of Windows 7

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We’ve been talking about the value that Windows 7 Professional brings to small businesses for a while, including productivity benefits that can help businesses save time and money. Today we’d like to share some details from an IDC White Paper sponsored by Microsoft worldwide research study, which explores the business value and return on investment (ROI) of Windows 7 for small and midsize businesses.

The study found that both end-users and IT managers reported faster reboots, shorter start-up times and fewer software failures with Windows 7 than previous versions of the operating system. Additionally, the research found that the majority of users reported significant time savings associated with many of the new features.

IDC’s research team conducted qualitative case study interviews, quantitative end user and IT manager surveys, and used an ROI model for Windows 7 deployment to generate their results. Through the Windows 7 ROI analysis and the end-user survey, research showed Windows 7 deployment resulted in positive changes in all measured categories, ultimately saving businesses time and money.

Researchers found the payback to companies started just after seven months and a return on investment of 375 percent. It showed that each user saves an average of about 43 hours, or $1,400 total benefit per PC, annually.

We’re happy to find that Windows 7 is helping small and midsize businesses work more efficiently and we’re thankful to all of the businesses out there that helped us develop Windows 7 Professional for you! If you want to find out more about how Microsoft and Windows 7 is helping small and midsize businesses, please visit us at the Windows for Small and Midsize Business site. If you have time, drop us a line and let us know how Windows 7 Professional is working for you.

Jun

29

Windows 7 Compatibility Center: 17 markets in 12 languages to list over 100,000 products & new IE8 Tools

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I’m pleased to announce we’ve expanded support for the Windows 7 Compatibility Center.  The fantastic Windows 7 momentum continues with a 150 million licenses sold to date, so ongoing support for the huge number of products that work with Windows is critical.

Since my first announcement on the Windows Compatibility Center and Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, we’ve had over 25 million visitors and have been busy adding thousands of compatible applications and devices to our database.  We now track over 100,000 consumer and business products across the globe.  While this is just a sample of everything available on Windows 7, we aim to provide compatibility information for the most popular products with links to software upgrades, device driver downloads, and help resources should you need them.

So here’s what we’re releasing today….

The Windows 7 Compatibility Center now supports searching and browsing over 100,000 products across 17 markets and 12 languages.  When visitors in Australia, Brazil, Canada (English & French), China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States go to www.windows.com/compatibility, they will automatically be directed to the market and language that matches their browser setting.  From there, visitors can search and browse applications and devices relevant to their local market or use the ‘market picker’ at the top of the page to see what’s available in other languages.

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We also have a couple of new search tools for Internet Explorer 8 that hook right into the Compatibility Center. You can download this IE8 Search Provider to search from your browser’s toolbar and this IE8 Accelerator which lets you right-click a product’s name on any website to get instant results from the Compatibility Center. (These are only available in English for now.)

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Finally, we really want to hear from our customers about how it’s going with your devices and applications on Windows 7, so we encourage you to let us know by using the Compatibly Center feedback forms. Also look for links to the Microsoft Answers forum where you can post questions and search for answers from the community and Microsoft folks.

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Cheers, Mark

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