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Windows 8.x and Business Continuity
As system administrators, you're often called upon to advise business leaders on your company's technology pathways. The newest dilemma to grab our too-short attention spans is whether to entertain a Windows 8.x upgrade, to stay with Windows 7 until January 2020, or to exercise our right to downgrade from Windows 8 to an older operating system. That's right, downgrade. Depending on your licensing agreement with Microsoft, you can purchase systems with Windows 8 preinstalled but trade in that operating system for an older one of your choosing – all the way back to Windows 95 or Windows NT 3.51. You might have many reasons for making the decision to downgrade, but the most compelling one is to maintain business continuity.
Company executives toss around terms like "business continuity" without a second thought, but to those of us in the trenches who face users directly, buzzwords take on different meanings. Business continuity to us means keeping servers and desktops running by preventing hacks, updating software, training users … wait, what? Training users is part of business continuity? Yes, it is. In fact, it's a critical part of continuity.
The catch with end-user training is that if you perform a mass desktop operating system upgrade, there's no time to train the users. It's just not possible. It's particularly impossible when your upgrade is from Windows XP, Vista, or 7 to something totally foreign like Windows 8.
So, the question becomes, "How do you maintain business continuity and upgrade to Windows 8.x?"
The answer, believe it or not, is very simple: You let the users drive the conversion.
Yes, that's another "Say what?" moment. Since when have we, as system administrators, ever let users drive any changes to the environment? It just isn't done. It's true; we don't allow users to drive changes. There's good reason for that. We know better than they do about what's good for them. Or, we used
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