An Argument for Modern Work Styles

Today, a close friend of mine (we’ll call her Cindy) told me that she was going to pick up her new computer. However, she was dismayed because she wouldn’t be able to get any work done until she received the new machine and completed training later in the morning. Her IT department had taken her old computer to transfer data to her new machine.

This is where I got confused.

See, I’m fortunate to work at Microsoft where we build and use tools that provide a tremendous amount of agility in how we work, whether we’re in engineering, HR, marketing, sales or one of the many other disciplines required to operate a large company like Microsoft. So, this scenario really got me.

For some additional context, when Cindy worked from home, she used her personal PC to VPN into the corporate network and then she would remote desktop to her PC tower at her desk. She actually used the email client running on her office desktop PC through RDP from her (slow) home PC. It baffled me.

However, now that her company is giving her a new laptop, working from home should be easier. Hopefully, access to her office files will be more seamless. Maybe she won’t even need that VPN. But I’m skeptical. Getting a laptop does not, in and of itself, change much and unfortunately, the transition to this laptop indicates to me that her company may not have really enabled their employees the type of agility and flexibility that Office 365 can provide.

If I were to have mapped out this laptop transition plan, IT wouldn’t have touched her existing desktop. Here’s what I would have done…

1. Push out OneDrive for Business to all of the existing machines. I know her company is using Office 365 so if they pushed out the latest client that includes Known Folder Move, all of her pertinent data would have been synchronized to Office 365.
2. Provision her new laptop (hopefully using AutoPilot) with her Office 365 account configured for Outlook, the other Office applications and OneDrive for Business... as well as any other required corporate applications and configurations (network drive mappings, security, etc.).
3. Give Cindy her new laptop and send her off.

With these “simple” steps, Cindy would never have experienced any downtime because any work she did on her old PC would have automatically synchronized to her OneDrive account and back down to her new laptop. I put simple in quotes above because I know these things get more complex in corporate IT but the foundations exist and there is no reason Cindy should have experienced any downtime during this transition.

In the productivity space at Microsoft, we consider something like this pretty foundational for enabling users to truly change the way they work and start to bring more value to their organization. I don’t want to dismiss the IT complexity, change management and security controls that need to be considered but it is not only possible, but very doable.