Join Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division, and Robert Wahbe, Corporate Vice President of the Server and Tools Marketing Group at Microsoft, for the TechEd Europe 2009 keynote on Monday November 9th starting at 6:30am Pacific. During the keynote, Stephen and Robert will discuss the state of IT and the new generation of business solutions from Microsoft that will help customers reach their full business potential. Following the keynote at 8:00am Pacific there will be a post-keynote Q&A with Chris Capossela, Senior Vice President of the Information Worker Product Management Group, Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President of Infrastructure Server Marketing, and Tami Reller, Corporate Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Windows and Windows Live.

You’ll be able to watch the keynote and participate in the post-keynote Q&A via the Microsoft TechEd Global Press Room. Additionally, you can follow the excitement on Twitter by using the hashtag #TEE09.

Dell is jumping in to help business (commercial) customers get ready for Windows 7 by offering Windows 7 drivers for their commercial desktop and laptop PCs. They are posting their Windows 7 drivers here (see Drivers and Downloads on left-hand navigation).

By offering drivers for their commercial desktop and laptop PCs, Dell is helping business customers with Dell PCs in their environments prepare for Windows 7 deployments.

For more information, see this blog post on Dell’s Inside Enterprise IT Blog.

RSA is here again, and presents a great opportunity to discuss the security in Windows 7: specifically how certain features in the OS address key security-related enterprise scenarios. In today’s economic times, businesses and their shareholders need to know that when they make an investment in a product, they are doing so responsibly and securely, and the investment is sound. Windows 7 is this sound investment: it includes features that allow workers to work anywhere, while leaving IT Pros confident that business-related data and content are secure.

The world has changed a great deal in the last decade. Information workers interact with their computers in new ways and have incorporated technology into everything they do, as a result the security landscape has greatly evolved. For example, in 2001, mobile and wireless workers weren’t impacting IT decision making; today, they make up more than a quarter of the workforce. In 2008, laptops made up more than half of all devices purchased in the enterprise. With Windows Vista, we made significant investments to address many of these security concerns and developed the most secure OS to date. With Windows 7, we are carrying forward that investment.

When we began developing for Windows 7, we decided to approach our security feature enhancements in terms of user type and scenarios. We looked at a few types of workers - the mobile worker on the go, the remote worker in a branch office, the IT Pro and the security expert. All have unique needs, pain points, and styles of work - and we’re addressing each in Windows 7.

Consider being a mobile worker. The challenge for you is connectivity and access. Meanwhile, your IT Pro at the office is worried about balancing those with data protection and network security. With Windows 7, we focused on a few key features to address this scenario, and to build confidence in enterprises trying to get the most out of a mobile workforce.

• DirectAccess lets mobile workers connect quickly and securely to a corporate network over any Internet connection, without having to manually access their virtual private network. IT can leverage DirectAccess to manage the Group Policy settings and deliver updates to mobile computers, even if the user is not logged on.
• BitLocker, introduced in Windows Vista, now allows end users to right-click on a drive to quickly enable it, making it more intuitive and easier to use.
• BitLocker To Go now extends support of BitLocker drive encryption to USB removable storage devices – like our mobile worker’s flash drive (see this Springboard Series Video). Theft and loss of proprietary data from mobile devices is a great expense for businesses. However, the loss of integrity is even harder to recover.

The remote worker scenario has similar challenges to the mobile worker, but requires ease of access on a more regular basis. According to a recent study, 91% of employees work away from the corporate headquarters, with the bulk of these working in branch offices. These workers often face difficulties and long wait times accessing information off the corporate drive. With this pain point in mind, we introduced BranchCache, which lets users access information more quickly. For IT Pros, this means the assurance that branch machines maintain the same security protocols as the home office.

For home-use scenarios, employees expect the same level of connectivity and access they would have in the office. In Windows Vista, the firewall policy was based on the type of network connection established – such as Home or Work. This created an obstacle when workers logged on at home, using a Home connection and virtual private networking (VPN), because firewall settings were not set up appropriately for this scenario. So we made changes. With Windows 7, enterprises will be able to simplify their connectivity and security policies by maintaining a single set of rules for both remote clients and clients physically connected to the corporate network.

And businesses will have confidence that all remote users – whether branch office or mobile - will benefit from key improvements in IE8, including protection against XSS threats, identity theft, and new types of phishing attacks like Clickjacking. I think the work we did in IE 8 really helps put people in control of their online safety and privacy.

Finally, let’s take a look at issues people face when trying to manage these environments. Not surprisingly, IT Pros and security experts have daunting missions: they enable secure access to data for mobile, remote and local users; keep systems up to date; and track accessed data– all while attempting to drive new value for the business - it’s enough to cause IT Pro insomnia. As such, we continue to develop a range of security solutions to address evolving IT needs.

Some key examples of user scenarios empowering technology:

• AppLocker: We received feedback that workers today put software from home on their PCS, download applications from the Internet, and access programs through email. As a result, there’s a higher difficulty ensuring PCs in the enterprise environment are running only approved, licensed software. AppLocker solves this issue; it’s an administered mechanism that allows a business’ security expert to specify what is allowed to run on each user’s PC.
• Network Access Protection: This allows IT Pros to create solutions to validate computers that connect to their network and limit the access or communication of noncompliant computers.
• Microsoft Asset Inventory Service: Part of Microsoft Desktop Optimization, complements the OS security and compliance technologies by allowing our IT Pro a comprehensive view of the enterprise desktop software environment.
• User Account Control: We heard loud and clear that end-users wanted fewer UAC prompts and more control over what items they are prompted for, but we know IT Pros still need control over what’s installed or run on a machine. As a result, in Windows 7, we made specific changes to enhance the user experience, while still ensuring the same level of security.

The enterprise security features we’re discussing today are the product of hard engineering work coupled with an understanding of our customers and the security landscape. It’s important to keep in mind that some of these features only work when partnered with Windows Server; for an optimal experience, we recommend businesses use Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 together upon their availability.

We recognize the enterprise customer for Windows has evolved dramatically over the years and we’ve created solutions to address the needs of varying enterprise scenarios. It’s important to note our work is never finished! We are constantly hearing from our customers about ways to make their machines more secure and productive in their environments. We continue to listen to this feedback and apply it to our technologies. It’s our goal to build technology that lets businesses prosper in a consistently changing security landscape.

There’s been a lot of talk in the community about what Windows 7 offers consumers. Today, I’d like to highlight the enterprise value of the product and how it reflects what customers and partners told us enterprises need most.

With Windows Vista, we learned a lot about how involved our customers and partners like to be in the development of an OS – in a nutshell, early and often. With Windows 7, we changed the way we developed the Windows OS in order to be more responsive to that feedback. As such, early on we identified three main principles to our new process:

• Planning: Our team spent six months on planning Windows 7 in a “vision phase.” We analyzed trends and customer needs before building features. We also focused more on end-to-end business scenarios, rather than solely on features and technologies.
• Predictability: We committed to giving our customers and partners a timeframe for our release and stuck to it. We remain on track to ship Windows 7 within three years of the Windows Vista release. We also only shared information about Windows 7 when we had a higher degree of certainty which has resulted in minimal changes from earlier disclosures.
• Early Ecosystem Engagement: We engaged with partners during the early stages of Windows 7 development, rather than waiting for the traditional beta timeframe. This has allowed for a more seamless experience and greater compatibility in all areas.

There are three key areas we look at in our development process: industry trends, in-depth discussions with top customers and partners, and extensive quantitative customer research.

I won’t go into details except to remind you of trends with the most significant impact on IT today: costs, consumerization, reducing carbon footprint, contingency planning and compliance. As a result of the continued economic deterioration, most businesses are thinking about cost. IT is under pressure to deliver efficiencies in their environments and greater ROI on technology expenses – we recognize this through personal experience and input from our customers and partners.

We spent a great deal of time talking and engaging with our customers and partners in order to really understand what’s on their mind. Knowing where their challenges lie and what tools they need to be successful helps us deliver an OS that meets their needs and is a valuable investment, which is critical when IT budgets are tighter than ever.

This engagement came in two forms – qualitative and quantitative.

Our qualitative outreach consisted of over 100 of our top customers through five programmatic engagement vehicles:

• Desktop Advisory Council: Twenty-seven active IT leaders across a variety of industries including some of the world’s largest manufacturers, banks, insurers, telecoms, energy companies and professional services firms. We used their input for overall direction and feature decisions.
• OEM Engagement: Leading manufacturers from around the world. This gave us an opportunity to inform and set direction, while receiving their feedback.
• Ecosystem Engagement: Members of the Windows Ecosystem Readiness Program received access to builds and toolkits for Windows 7. They also gained access to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 labs for partners.
• Technology Adoption Program: Strictly engineering-focused, customers in TAP committed a large investment of their time and resources in test deployments of Beta and pre-Beta code. Their help enables us to validate features in real-world situations, produce bugs and generate feedback.
• First Wave Program: Customers who are already in progress with deploying Windows 7 Beta in their environment. This group provides real time feedback on their experience deploying Windows 7 Beta and helps us see what an enterprise deployment looks like.

For our Quantitative Research, we engaged extensively with almost 4000 customers in developing and emerging markets. This research surfaced the top areas of concern: Risk Management, Compliance and Mobility. Key findings included:

• 56% said they needed help protecting corporate data on laptops. This validated our decision to include BitLocker in Windows 7 Enterprise, and to extend its capabilities to the portable hard drives that can be just as dangerous and more loosely monitored than laptops.
• 61% expressed a deep concern about ensuring their users install and use only authorized applications (for fear of security breaches from unauthorized applications). This helped prioritize our plan to develop AppLocker.
• 49% wanted to make it easier for remote workers to access corporate resources, bubbling a plan up for Direct Access capabilities.

So how did this affect Windows 7?

Windows 7 Enterprise mirrors what we learned during our planning and research phase and resulted in three big areas of investment:

• Making users Productive Anywhere is a focus on the mobile user community and empowering users with seamless access: We built technologies into Windows 7 such as BranchCache, Direct Access, Federated Search, and Enterprise Search Scopes to enable users to access to their data and applications anywhere and anytime.
• Improving Security and Control is a focus on protecting data, enabling compliance and giving IT better control: With this in mind we designed BitLocker To Go, which protects data stored on portable media, such as USB drives. This enables IT to only allow authorized users to read data or portable media, even if the media is lost or stolen. Additionally, AppLocker provides a mechanism for administrators to specify via Group Policy exactly what is allowed to run on their systems.
• Streamlining PC Management is a continued focus to drive the cost of managing a Windows environment down: Windows 7 makes managing and deploying desktops, laptops and virtual environments much easier. IT Pros can use the same tools and skills they use today with Windows Vista for Windows 7. New scripting and automation capabilities through Windows PowerShell 2.0 help reduce the costs of managing and troubleshooting PCs.

And we’re not finished! Research on Windows 7 overall continues today as we receive feedback from our Beta testers. We’ve received over 500,000 Send Feedback reports on Windows 7 Beta. Thanks to our dedicated customers, we have hundreds of fixes in the pipeline. This is a testament to how we’re taking your feedback and inputting it directly into Windows 7.

With Windows 7, we’ve advanced our vision for an Optimized Desktop to allow administrators the ability to balance flexibility and control in helping end-users work better in their environments. Windows 7 Enterprise, along with Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), delivers Microsoft Windows Optimized Desktop vision to customers: it gives users anytime, anywhere access to information they need to get their work done; while providing tools for IT to support their business securely, protect corporate data, achieve cost efficiencies, and take advantage of the virtualization trends in the client computing arena.

To summarize, customers tell us the economy is bringing new levels of scrutiny to how they manage costs, mitigate risks and make their people more productive with less. We get it. Windows 7 Enterprise is about helping both IT Pros and end users manage an intensifying – and often opposing – confluence of pressures.

Throughout the Windows 7 development process, we’ve been committed to creating an OS that is designed for the way people actually work. We’re convinced Windows 7 has an exciting and powerful offering for our business customers, but we want to hear from you. If you are one of our enterprise customers considering Windows 7, our guidance to you is to start testing and planning now and send us your feedback. If you haven’t been considering Windows 7, we think there are compelling reasons for you to take another look.

You may have caught Brandon’s post last week looking at our SKU strategy for Windows 7. In addition to the guidance we provided earlier today for commercial customers looking at deploying Windows Vista, I want to also take a closer look at Windows 7 Enterprise specifically and what it means for our largest commercial customers.

Windows 7 Enterprise edition is designed to address the needs of our enterprise customers who have needs around advanced data protection, enabling user productivity and streamlining their PC management. Windows 7 Enterprise is part of the Windows Optimized Desktop offering, which also includes the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) tools and will only be available to customers with Microsoft Software Assurance on their Windows client licenses.

If you are an enterprise customer with Software Assurance on your existing Windows licenses when Windows 7 is released, then you automatically get the rights to deploy Windows 7 Enterprise to PCs in your environment. Additionally, customers who buy Windows 7 Professional and add Software Assurance will also have rights to deploy the Enterprise edition.

For our enterprise customers, we’re especially excited about the following Windows 7 Enterprise features that deliver greater efficiency and cost savings:

• DirectAccess: Windows 7, along with the network technologies in Windows Server 2008 R2, provides this network technology that enables the user to seamlessly access corporate network resources when on the Internet, without having to create a VPN connection.
• BranchCache: Windows 7 together with Windows Server 2008 R2 offers an alternative to alleviate the problems of slow connectivity, delivering increased network responsiveness of applications and giving users in remote offices an experience more like working in the head office. When BranchCache is enabled, a copy of data accessed from an intranet web site or a file server is cached locally within a branch office.
• Enterprise Search Scopes: allows IT administrators to populate links to the commonly used internal sites -- for example, SharePoint sites – to the Windows Explorer UI or to the Start menu or in Windows 7, using Group Policy. These links simplify access to the target internal data sources on the network for business users.
• BitLocker & BitLocker To Go: protect data on PCs and removable drives, with manageability to enforce encryption and backup of recovery keys. Windows 7 extends BitLocker protection to USB storage devices while making the original functionality even easier to use. Note: BitLocker for PCs and BitLocker To Go for removal hard drives such as external USB drives.
• AppLocker: is a flexible, easy-to-use mechanism that enables IT professionals to specify exactly what is allowed to run on user desktops. It restricts unauthorized software while allowing applications, installation programs, and scripts that users need.
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Optimizations: delivers desktop functionality in Windows 7 using virtual machines hosted on servers—a solution known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). VDI enables users to access their desktops remotely as well as the ability to reuse virtual machine (VHD) images to boot a physical PC. Windows 7 provides for better user experience in VDI scenarios, with better graphics, audio and local device support.
• Multi Lingual User Interface: the Language Packs in Windows 7 Enterprise enable you to support up to 36 different languages using a single Windows master image, rather than creating a separate image for each language used in the organization.

Other benefits to Windows 7 Enterprise include:

• Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA)
• License rights to run up to four additional copies of Windows in virtual machines
• License rights for network booting of Windows

Because each high edition SKU is a superset of the previous SKU, Windows 7 Enterprise includes all end user features available in Windows 7 Professional, as well as the DVD Playback Codec and Windows Media Center.

More information about Windows 7 Enterprise is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/windows-7-enterprise.aspx

Windows 7 Enterprise is another example of Microsoft’s commitment to delivering continual innovation to enterprise customers through Software Assurance. While we expect these features will be of greatest interest to our enterprise customers, any Windows client Software Assurance customer will have the rights to deploy the Enterprise edition. We look forward to sharing more information about Windows 7 Enterprise and what it has to offer our business customers.

Hi, I’m Gavriella; welcome to the new Windows for your Business Blog.

Let me introduce myself: I’m a member of the Windows Product Management team and have been at Microsoft for 13 years. For the last two and a half, I’ve been focused on product management for MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack). In my new role as Senior Director, I’m leading Product Management for Windows Client, including the Windows OS, the MDOP products, and the client virtualization strategy for our commercial customers. For us that means all customers from small businesses through large enterprises. My team and I are focused on helping optimize the desktop experience for our business customers - we focus on enabling end-user productivity and reducing desktop administration overhead.

Moving forward, the Windows for Your Business Blog will focus on Windows for our commercial customers, and today I want to specifically talk about what we’re doing to help those customers with their deployments and reducing IT costs.

With the current state of the economy, I understand that many companies are scrutinizing IT budgets and doing some “belt-tightening.” The customers I have spoken to most recently are also looking for technology that will lead to greater efficiency and cost savings to help them shift costs out of the organization, as well as align with business needs. I think customers are recognizing that this economic downturn is not a short term penny-pinching exercise. Instead, we’re all looking for strategies to weather this economic storm. In order to do this, we will need to make fundamental changes that reduce operating margins for the long term.

I also know that the reality of customers’ deployment projects will typically take them 12-18 months of planning and testing before operating system deployments can begin. Application testing and migration readiness typically takes a significant portion of this time. It also takes time for companies to standardize hardware, certify operating system images, select deployment tools and methods, as well as train end-users and IT for the new operating system.

With this demand on time, plus the strains from today’s economy, our customers are under a lot of pressure.

As a first step, we recommend our customers assess their environment to be in a better position to decide what OS they need to deploy:

1. Take an inventory of how many applications you manage in your current enterprise environment – here is guidance that can help.

2. Talk to your application vendors to find out how long they intend to provide support for their application running in Windows XP and when they plan to support their application running in Windows 7.

3. This will help you assess the maximum length of time that you have to move from Windows XP to Windows 7.

• Then you should assess the level of application compatibility that your applications have with Windows 7 (we recommend you test your applications against Windows Vista as there will be a high degree of compatibility between Windows 7 and Windows Vista) – this will help you assess how many of your applications will need to be upgraded, remediated or replaced in order to work in your new operating environment.
• If you test your applications against the Windows 7 Beta, we recommend that for the mainstream OS deployment, you later test applications against the RTM (Release-to-Manufacturing) release.
• Here is guidance and documentation on performing your application compatibility testing: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc507853.aspx.

4. Then you should assess the hardware compatibility in your environment (and what it will be in the 12-18 months that it might take for you to complete the deployment of the new OS).

• Here is guidance and documentation on performing your hardware assessment: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/solutionaccelerators/hardwareassessment/wv/default.mspx.

5. Additionally, here are other useful steps to consider as you are assessing for OS deployment: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749165.aspx.

Having this information about your environment will help you identify any blocking issues that you need to address in your OS migration and what your timelines might look like in reality.

We recommend you use what you are running today to make the right decision for your business.

• If you are running Windows 2000 in your environment: Migrate your Windows 2000 PCs to Windows Vista as soon as possible. Extended support for Windows 2000 ends Q2 2010, and as an commerical customer, you may soon find your business’s critical applications are unsupported.
• If you are in the process of planning or deploying Windows Vista: Continue your Windows Vista SP1 deployment. If you’re really in the early stages or just starting on Windows Vista, plan to test and deploy Windows Vista SP2 (on target to RTM Q2 2009). Moving onto Windows Vista now will allow for an easier transition to Windows 7 in the future due to the high degree of compatibility.
• If you are on Windows XP now and are undecided about which OS to move to: Make sure you taken into consideration the risk of skipping Windows Vista, which I am discussing below. And know that deploying Windows Vista now will make the future transition to Windows 7 easier.
• If you are on Windows XP now and are waiting for Windows 7: Make sure you take into consideration the risks of skipping Windows Vista, and plan on starting an early evaluation of Windows 7 for your company using the beta that’s available now. Testing and remediating applications on Windows Vista will ease your Windows 7 deployment due to the high degree of compatibility.

We know some of our customers are considering waiting for Windows 7 instead of deploying Windows Vista today. We want these customers to understand the following considerations, so they are not surprised later on:

• You may find your company in situations where applications are no longer supported on Windows XP and not yet supported on Windows 7.
• You will want to take time to evaluate Windows 7 just as you evaluate any new operating system for your environment prior to deployment (see deployment realities above). As Windows 7 is planned to be released in about 3 years after Windows Vista, the total period that many customers will likely be waiting prior to deploying Windows 7 in their environment will likely be in the range of 5 years after Windows Vista release.

Regardless of which OS you plan to deploy or are running today, consider deploying the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) which is part of the Windows Optimized Desktop, so that you can implement cost saving best practices. The Windows Optimized Desktop is the combination of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) and the Windows OS (Windows Vista Enterprise or Windows 7 Enterprise). MDOP offers Software Assurance customers advanced tools to provide immediate ROI through software asset management, help desk management, application management and group policy management.

We expect deployment and application migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 to be similar in effort to going from Windows XP to Windows Vista. As I mentioned above, there is a great deal of compatibility between both Windows Vista and Windows 7, as we are not introducing any major architectural changes. Our customers who focus efforts in getting their applications to work on Windows Vista will ease future migration to Windows 7 and help accelerate their Windows 7 deployment.

Customers who are in the process of deploying Windows Vista or who are considering a deployment to Windows Vista will find their investment in the deployment not only pays off in the value they’ll receive today, but will also put them in a much better place to take advantage of the benefits of Windows 7 moving forward.

We hope this guidance will help you, our business customers, make informed decisions on your Windows deployment plans going forward.