So – What have I learned in the first month working for Microsoft.

Certainly too much to write about on a blog and a lot of it I couldn’t anyway. But  I want to focus on two things that have particularly struck me as hugely important to my daily working life here.

First, I have an iPad and I even had a number of other touch devices going back to a Palm Pilot and an iPaq (the Compaq ones) in the 1990’s. BUT until now I have not really found anything that works for me as a touch interface. Either the screen has been too small, dark, sensitive or just plain clunky to use with Touch.

Enter Windows 8.1 and the world of Touch has become something that I just use and it is intuitive (for me) and things just happen more quickly and seamlessly. I have been allocated an Asus Ultrabook which is seriously cool (in a blokey gadget sort of way), it is light, fast and has capacity but most of all it has a great touch screen that makes Windows 8.1 work so well for me. So much so that when I use my Lab rig machine a Dell Precision M6700 behemoth I really really miss the touch screen, even running a full Private Cloud Lab. My belief is that Touch is definitely the future and it is no surprise to me that the ONLY machine I have ever supplied to any of my customers (before my life at Microsoft started) that I wish I could keep is the Asus ET2300 Touch all in one PC – Check it out its superb.

Secondly It shouldn’t really come as a surprise to me that a phrase that is omnipresent at Microsoft is Dogfood (indeed there is an internal dogfood site).

As an IT consultant over a good few years, I rarely visited a customer where everything just worked. Where everyone was happy with the internal IT team and where the systems ‘just worked’. Well as far as I have found so far (and I have looked quite hard). Everything here is dogfood and it just works. I sit at home using DirectAccess (part of the Windows Server 2012 R2 remote access story), this uses Virtual Smart Card technology too so providing you have a modern system with a TPM on board you can dispense with the physical card for remote access. The TPM also enables BitLocker Drive Encryption which protects all your valuable data.

All this is Dogfood here and all of this is available out of the box in Windows Server 2012 R2. Why not go and try it out here now.

I haven’t even started on the use of System Center, Windows Azure, Office 365 – all in use to run the company not just for demonstration or evaluation.

Why not come along to one of our IT Camps in April to see how Windows Server 2012 R2 and the System Center 2012 R2 components help to build the modern data center based Private Clouds and also the see the Hybrid cloud model using Windows Azure.

Book Here, they are being held in some very special places!

See you there