Even for a small business, buying a new operating system for every employee running Windows may get expensive. It could even cause you to question the value of upgrading, especially given the serious issues that plagued Windows Vista throughout its dominance of the market and the extra expense required to hire specialised IT support if something goes wrong. It’s likely that everything in your company functions well with your current Windows installation, such as phone systems, software, servers, and so on. Upgrading to Windows 7, however, is a business decision that will profit your company greatly in the long run, because this time Microsoft has done quite a number of things right and in ways that are guaranteed to encourage productivity in the office.
First and most important are the speed improvements that Microsoft has made. Anyone with a Vista PC that has been in use for more than a year will be familiar with how slow the start-up and shut-down can be. We’ve seen Vista computers take a full ten minutes to start up, a complete waste of employees’ time. This can, of course, be optimised with some attention to the PC in question, but Windows 7 completely eliminates this need, cutting down on costs and increasing productivity. Those extra minutes add up fast and help you get more work for your money.
Windows 7 introduces a few new features designed to help your employees get faster access to their important documents. In Windows Vista, important programs can be “pinned” to the top of the Start menu, making them accessible in two clicks. Windows 7 adds the ability to pin documents to the taskbar, so your essentials are available in just one click, and Microsoft has also retained your ability to pin programs to the start menu and taskbar. This feature immediately cuts down on the time required to keep finding and opening important documents you need to get work done fast.
Windows 7 also introduces the snap and shake features. “Snap” enables you to quickly and easily resize documents so that it’s easier to instantly place them beside one another. This allows for easy comparisons without a ton of time spent trying to resize windows in an attempt to get all of their content visible next to one another. The “shake” feature is neat, too; by shaking the window you can remove all the other windows on the desktop, reducing distractions and allowing you to see your desktop more clearly. Shake again, and the windows will all come back, so don’t worry, you haven’t lost anything.
Federated search is another tool that is purposely designed to increase workplace productivity. The new search bar is available right from the start menu, like in Windows Vista, but doesn’t search just programs or just documents. It provides everything at a glance, so even if you barely remember what you’re looking for, you’ll find it a whole lot easier and less time-consuming to find it. Like search online, results are split into categories with your search terms highlighted, making it easier to identify at a glance whether or not you have found what you’ve been looking for. Windows 7 can also search external hard drives, networked PCs, and libraries, so you’ll never lose your documents.
Windows 7 has even more features to build up your small business’s productivity and increase the amount of work your employees can do with a minimum of effort. If that’s not worth the cost of upgrading, we’re not sure what is.
Tags: windows 7
