As originally published in the American City Business Journals.
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That’s right, folks — one year later, it’s finally the right time to consider moving your business over to a Windows 10 platform.
As of July, Windows 10 is running on 350 million devices.
And while I previously preached caution and patience regarding this new operating system, I’m now comfortable enough to join the masses and begin advising my clients to upgrade.
Why the wait?
There are always kinks to iron out with any software release. And, as we just saw with the anniversary update debacle, Windows has no immunity to this kind of trouble.
The more time you give other people to discover bugs, compatibility issues, and general glitches — and the more time you give Microsoft to patch these issues — the fewer your staff will have to deal with and the more productive you’ll be as an organization.
The “bleeding edge” is not where most of us want to be as a business.
When to upgrade
Even though we’ve given Windows 10 the necessary time to stabilize, the answer isn’t exactly to upgrade “now” — it’s more along the lines of “whenever you go through your next hardware upgrade cycle.”
As I’ve explored before, there are two main reasons to upgrade software: (1) your current version is out of support; (2) the new version will have a measurable impact on your business. So if you’re already on Windows 7 or 8, there’s still no urgency to making the switch; while the operating system is nice, it isn’t going to have a drastic effect on your productivity or efficiency.
But when it does come time to refresh some or all of your computers, it would make good sense to move your whole organization to the most current version of Windows, which will be under (extended) support until 2025.
How to upgrade
As with any large-scale upgrade, you need to approach the project methodically; you most definitely do not want a free-for-all where your staff members click that “upgrade” button whenever they see fit, as you could still run into:
- Compatibility issues with your line-of-business applications
- Lost productivity as your team fumbles around without proper training
- A spike in support costs as your information technology (IT) team helps troubleshoot
So coordinate with your IT team to test the platform extensively, and then roll it out to your entire staff at one time. The less savvy your team is, the more time you should invest in training.
From there, enjoy!