In a new blog post, Microsoft has revealed that the company has over 30,000 employees who are already running Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10. It comes as no surprise that Microsoft employees would be using the company’s latest operating system and internet browser.
“We’re currently ‘dogfooding’ several products and services, but the most interest is with Windows 8 and IE 10 Release Preview. As of mid-July we had more than 30,000 systems and nearly 30,000 employees running Windows 8 and IE10,” Microsoft stated in a blog post.
Microsoft used a tool called IT Easy Installer that allowed for rapid deployment and automated the install of Windows 8 to its employees. Here are some highlights of the key components of the IT Easy Installer tool:
- Hardware compliance and guidance scans the employee’s machine and confirms if the system meets the Windows 8 minimum system requirements, provides Microsoft IT recommended configuration for each
requirement, checks if the system is a Microsoft IT standard hardware, checks if Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is available for provisioning Windows 8 DirectAccess (DA), provides driver coverage information for the standard and non-standard hardware by displaying the missing driver information, and provides Windows experience index scores. - Software guidance scans the employee’s machine for all installed software (Microsoft products and third party) and provides Windows 8 compatibility guidance for each installed software.
- Line of Business application guidance provides guidance on compatibility status of the business critical and widely used internal line-of-business websites that are tested by Microsoft IT and allows employees to report new applications that can be considered to be tested.
- Data migration solution allows employees to migrate their data and settings, and provides options to migrate during installation (in-place) or migrate to local or network storage provided by Microsoft IT prior to the installation and restore afterwards.
- Install Windows 8 provides integrated installation experience that interfaces with all operating system deployment delivery channels and automatically selects the best delivery channel based on the user’s connectivity profile and location.
Microsoft also created 75 Windows To Go devices and made them available to senior staff members, engineers, and architects.
