Which Windows 7 is Right for Your Business?

Now that Windows 7 is here, you have some decisions to make. Microsoft has a virtual smorgasbord of options to choose from and it can get a little tricky trying to figure out which flavor of Windows 7 you should choose. In particular, which version of Windows 7 is right for small and medium businesses?

By Tony Bradley
Mon, November 02, 2009

PC World — Now that Windows 7 is here, you have some decisions to make. Microsoft has a virtual smorgasbord of options to choose from and it can get a little tricky trying to figure out which flavor of Windows 7 you should choose. In particular, which version of Windows 7 is right for small and medium businesses?

[ For complete coverage on Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system -- including hands-on reviews, video tutorials and advice on enterprise rollouts-- see CIO.com's Windows 7 Bible. ]

If you look at new desktops and laptops available from Best Buy or Dell you can see that there are some de facto choices made for you depending on the class of the system. Consumer systems come with Windows Home Premium (mostly the 64-bit version), and business systems come with Windows 7 Professional. Large businesses fall into a whole different category with both Microsoft and vendors like Dell, and those systems would come with Windows 7 Enterprise by default.

Slideshow: Windows 7 in Pictures: The Coolest New Hardware
Slideshow: 7 Tools to Ease Your Windows 7 Rollout
Slideshow: Windows 7 in Pictures: 10 Cool Desktop Features

So, if you are a small or medium business, Windows 7 Professional is ostensibly the version of Windows 7 for you. Windows 7 Professional does have some capabilities that businesses need that you can't find in Windows Home Premium--support for more system memory and dual physical CPU's, the ability to join a Windows domain, file encryption with EFS (Encrypting File System), the ability to use Windows XP-mode virtualization, and software policy restrictions. However, it is also missing some important features that small and medium businesses can benefit from.

BitLocker (and BitLocker-to-Go)

Windows 7 Professional provides some data encryption with EFS, but it doesn't have the ability to protect the entire hard drive with encryption. Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 7 Enterprise have BitLocker drive encryption which encrypts all data on the entire drive.

Roaming employees often carry gigabytes of sensitive or confidential information on their laptops which can be easily lost or stolen. BitLocker provides secure protection to ensure that unauthorized users are not able to access that data. BitLocker-to-Go provides similar data encryption for USB thumb drives and other portable data storage that are also easily 'misplaced'.

DirectAccess

Employees that work from home, or connect with the company network while traveling are used to the concept of the VPN (Virtual Private Network). The VPN serves its purpose for creating a secure connection between the remote computer and the internal company network across the Internet, but it is far from a perfect solution.

1 2 next page »

What is Tech Briefcase?

TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more

Bookmark content

Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.

Search and Store

Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.

View Anywhere

Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.

Don't have an account yet?

You are here: Technology Topics » News

Most Recent Technology Topics Stories

White Papers »

Finding the right cloud solutions for your organization

HP is driving the evolution of what we call the Instant-On Enterprise. It is an enterprise that embeds technology into everything it does to better serve citizens, partners, employees, and clients. We believe that today's Instant-On Enterprises need to think differently about how they source and deliver services that are enabled by technology. They need to take advantage of a hybrid delivery model-one that truly optimizes the mix between traditional IT, private cloud, and public cloud.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Converged Infrastructure for Dummies

As you know, everything is mobile, connected, interactive, and immediate. This is exactly why organizations need a highly agile IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with extreme fluctuations in business demand. This book will help you understand why infrastructure convergence has been widely accepted as the optimal approach for simplifying and accelerating your IT to deliver services at the speed of business while also shifting significantly more IT resources from operations to innovation.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Seven Priorities for Integrated Network Management - How HP Intelligent Management Center Delivers an Enterprise-class Solution

This white paper describes the major requirements for network management solutions to help the organizations become more profitable, efficient and reliable.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Measuring the Business Value of CI in the Data Center

One of the key strategies that IT teams are pursuing to reduce capital costs while boosting asset utilization and employee productivity is the transition to highly virtualized data centers. However, IDC finds that expectations for further boosts in IT asset use and operational efficiency often surpass the actual results for a variety of reasons. These problems can quickly overwhelm any hoped-for benefits as the scope of virtual server deployment expands.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Building Cloud-Optimized Data Center Networks white paper

Enterprises are turning to the Cloud to improve business agility, reduce expenses and accelerate business innovation. Cloud computing redefines the way IT assets are deployed and consumed and dramatically affects the way data center networks are architected and managed. Conventional hierarchical data center networks built to support traditional IT architectures can't meet the security, agility and price/performance requirements of virtualized cloud computing environments. This white paper reviews the impact of cloud computing on data center networks and describes HP's approach to building simpler, more secure and automated networks that fully meet the stringent performance, security, reliability and agility demands of the new data center in the Cloud.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

The Forrester Wave: Activities Streams, Q2 2012

The enterprise social software market is exploding thanks to converging trends of consumerization, cloud, and mobile. In this must-read report, "The Forrester Wave: Activities Streams, Q2 2012", Forrester Research Inc. evaluated five social software vendors with core strengths in the stream based on the overall strength of vendors' current offerings, a clear product strategy, and vendor market presence. In a detailed look at the space, Forrester named Yammer as a leader.

Webcasts »

Virtualization Success is a Team Effort

As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.

Oracle Database Appliance Best Practices

Business users increasingly demand 24x7 availability of their data while IT departments face the challenge of ensuring maximum availability while operating with limited budgets.

Unlock the Value of Cloud Computing with Workload Automation

Learn how to get the most from your cloud investment in our on-demand webinar from BMC and InformationWeek. You'll hear how integrating the cloud into your production workload brings critical business benefits.

Best Practices to Optimize Your Data Center at Every Layer of the Stack

Date: May 31, 2012
Time: 1 PM EST

Organizations are reaping the benefits of simplifying IT, lowering costs and dramatically improving transactional throughput by deploying optimized application-to-disk solutions. These pre-tuned, tested solutions encompass a wide variety of applications and use cases. Hear from industry experts, and IT executives, how these full-stack solutions can achieve three times faster deployment times and up to 75% reductions in acquisition and operational costs.

Workload Automation Trends and Best Practices in 2012

Find out when you join EMA Senior Analyst, Torsten Volk, for a discussion on the 2012 trends in workload automation and how these trends contribute to better connecting workload automation to business processes. These trends are derived from EMA's empirical research work conducted for the 2012 Workload Automation Radar Report.

Analytics at the Speed of Thought

What if you could run financial and operational planning cycles 10 times faster? Or monitor and adjust marketing campaigns in real time? What if you could instantly visualize how a price change would impact the profitability of thousands of products?

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter