Thoughts on Windows 11 SE from a Higher Education IT perspective
When Microsoft had their education-focused event earlier this month I don’t know what I was expecting. I had spent the previous week in a restorative and focused dive into Microsoft Ignite for three days sandwiched between a hectic Monday and Friday in the office. Upon watching the Education event over my lunch break the next Tuesday I was at first a little underwhelmed because I quickly realized that the event was really targeted at K-12 education and not higher education…I really should have known better, but my brain space was in enterprise-land after Ignite I guess. For the target: education, I think this is brilliant. Windows is still the most capable and flexible operating system out there for education and business. Windows is still the gears of industry. It provides the most hardware choice still and the most application support. With all of that power and flexible it can be hard to manage from an IT perspective, namely because most K-12 have underbudgeted and understaffed IT staff who work in high-touch environments. One big appeal of Chromebooks and iPads is with their MDM and cloud-managed solutions via Google Apps and JAMF are an IT dream. The problem is that Chromebooks are pretty limiting computing experience that limit you to web experiences a lot of the time and iPad are expensive and require the curriculum to work hand-in-hand with them because as much as I love iPadOS, its not a general-purpose operating system like a Windows or Macintosh. I see Windows 11SE as that answer to Chromebooks for education and exclusively for education. Business and home users want and need more out of generational-purpose computers. The floundering of Windows 10 S mode showed that the average consumer wants and expenses more out of their home computers. Businesses and higher education have the enterprise tools to manage their computers and the staff to do it.
Here are some uses for Windows 11SE that I could see in higher education
- Test Taking : Test taking computers need to regularly wiped and reloaded. They need keyboards, pointing devices, headphone ports, ports for external inputs like accessibility devices, and typically specialized testing software. Windows 11 SE sounds much easier to manage from an IT perspective.
- Class Registration : Particularly at my university we have this problem every year that we’re having a great decrease in traditional computer labs because students typically bring their own computers these days and we have repurposed the speakers into classrooms, flexible learning spaces, and lecture halls. Unfortunately this bites us in the butt every summer when incoming students come in for our summer camps. Having laptop carts of Windows 11 SE laptops would make it much easier to mange from an IT perspective if incoming students could use them to register for class in a full screen browser like Edge or Chrome.
- Virtual Desktop : During COVID, my college and several around campus invested heavily in Windows Virtual Desktop and it’s been a success. Its given us the ability to delivery high-end lab computing experience to anybody with an laptop with a web browser. With application delivery in Windows Virtual Desktop you could craft an experience that stuff like Edge, Chrome, and Microsoft Office run locally, but more demanding apps like AutoDesk or Adobe Creative Cloud runs in the cloud.
- Lab Computers: I’m thinking particularly for labs like physics, chemistry, or biology labs that its useful to have computers for data century, but students may not want to bring their own computers into the lab for safety purposes. I could see having a lab cart full of these Windows 11SE laptops being a useful tool, especially if you need to plug into lab equipment and pull data from them. Students could save their data to a cloud service and take it home with them to do their lab reports or heck, work on the lab reports in the lab itself and get help from TAs.
- Loaner Laptops: A lot of colleges have a bank of loaner laptops for students who have financial need or emergency need for a computer. These budgets machines would serve the basic needs of the students while being easy to maintain. Throw in something like Windows Virtual Desktop and I think you have a solution that could float a student though a tough time. Accidents happen with laptops every semester and somebody being without a machine for 2–3 weeks can wreck havoc on their lives. I think having machines you can easily and quickly turn around in a library setting is a great thing.
- Interview and job fair machines: As silly as it sounds, sometimes students need a machine to do a job interviews, register for more information, or companies borrow for the day. These machines would be much easier to deploy and loan out for the day.
Overall, I’m pretty excited about Windows 11 SE. I think its a more focused targeting of Windows for Education and doesn’t try to shoehorn a Chromebook experience into the home or enterprise space. The Surface Laptop SE is for school, the Surface Laptop for Go for home use, and the Surface Laptop 4 for the premium home or enterprise use. I do hope that Windows 11 SE does become an option in Intune for Education to retrofit to older devices, that’s my chief complaint. I think Microsoft is right by wanting it on newer hardware, but I think that an ISO to deploy via USB or a Configuration Policy in Intune would be a much-needed bridge. Ultimately, Microsoft is trying to do what Google and Apple are doing by providing an onboard ramp to their software so that when students graduate into the workspace they want their businesses to use stuff like Teams, Office365, Edge, Outlook, OneNote, Loop, etc. Overall, I think this is a good direction for Windows. It better targets the market its going after without trying to water down the experience outside that enviroment. I’m looking forward to seeing how Windows 11 SE continues to evolve.
