Fantastic Friday Read: “New experiences in Windows 11 and Windows 365 empower new ways of working”
Forgive me for going into full-on IT Pro territory this week, but I find Microsoft’s recent announcements around Windows365, their cloud-based virtual desktop technology fascinating. We use it at work to provide virtual labs for our students, allowing them to run high-end, graphically intensive applications such as Adobe Creative Cloud, Rhino, AutoCAD, Revit, etc from any computer with an internet connection, including Chromebooks, Macs, Linux machines, and even iPads. Particularly, I am excited about Windows 365 Boot, the future technology that will allow a Windows 11 machine to be a thin client for Windows365, which will be great for our remote offices and computer labs in our buildings…which should cut down on maintaining tons of endpoints all the time. Windows 365 is also interesting in that it will allow for Windows 11 users to be able to seamlessly integrate their work virtual desktop with their home PCs, being able to use the hardware they already have, but more seamlessly while maintaining the separation between the environments for security reasons…with more people working from home these days I can see that being really useful to IT departments and enable people to use the machines they already own to essentially have multiple computers if they want, the laptop they tout back and forth and then their desktop at home that’s fixed, but with a large monitor and a nice keyboard and mouse. The Windows365 app is honestly a good idea, as Windows as a cloud service becomes more mainstream I can see having a dedicated app with the Windows365 branding to be much easier for a the average user to wrap their heads around than knowing to go to Remote Desktop… a nice app, but one still build with IT Pros in mind so it can be both spartan in design and having many, many finicky settings for people to trip over. Finally, Windows 365 Offline is…wild? Being able to use a virtual desktop offline…like traditional Windows, but then it sync your changes back up when you go online? I’m not sure how that will work or the caveats (If you’re running a GPU intensive app on a machine without a good GPU is it just going to pause and let you run line of business apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc?)…so many questions with that one, but interesting idea nonetheless if they pull it off.
