Impact of Social Distancing on Windows 10 application discovery and packaging

During these uncharted times we have seen our customers and ourselves adapt to what is looking like the “new normal”, at least for the foreseeable future.

A “Quick and Dirty” Transition

Our Enterprise clients across the NHS, Construction, Central Government and Transport industries have performed miracles in the push to get people working from home and safety.  For expediency, the approach has often had to be “quick and dirty”, and we have helped organisations with multi-site key worker engineering teams to get 1,000s of users per week working from home. The prevalence of laptops in some organisations has of course helped; however the VARs that had been overstocked on desktop wireless cards must have had their phones running hot, and remote access tools like TeamViewer et al have seen a huge increase in demand.

For some, the transition to remote working has been more procedural; it isn’t the technical challenge but the social and management adjustment that is still being bedded in.  For others, all projects stopped to drive CV-19 activity to get people home, but now that has been completed there is a push to catch up on BAU and Windows 10 migrations activity.

The End of the Beginning

At APPtechnology, we have been able to transition all services to remote engagement and remote delivery models, removing the need for any onsite presence. From SCCM and Intune, to full Windows 10 migration workstreams, we can engage and deliver without setting foot on a new client’s premises. 

Offsite application packaging delivery is of course unaffected, but it has been interesting to see the spike in discovery throughputs that has been achieved in remote discovery services.  The fact that everyone is remote seems to have brought a new attitude to the supply of information and gathering configuration requirements from application sponsors and owners.

Emerging Trends

From the push to get users working from home there will be some “tidying up” that needs addressing. The strengthening of remote infrastructure capabilities for those organisations that continue to embrace remote working will be required.  We are seeing a drive towards Microsoft Endpoint Management techniques, especially around SCCM, Intune and Autopilot, as the way of addressing the “tidying up” required to get enterprises back to known baselines and standardised application management.

Some customers are even looking at the relaxing of social distancing as an opportunity to drive their W10 migrations and MEM technology take-up, with plans for returning employees to arrive to find migrated and managed equipment at their desks when they return.

With remote consultancy services, APPtechnology can assist customers with rapidly achieving these improvements in remote OS and application management without having to break social distancing or work from home directives.

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