Managed PCs of the Future

The Energizer engagement is an opportunity for Microsoft to test a futuristic vision of the PC, identified by Tim Sinclair, general manager for Windows Enterprise Management, as the “rationalized” PC-a PC that has been designed from the beginning for automated management.

Sinclair’s taxonomy of PC management includes the following levels:

The basic PC is unmanaged and manually updated and upgraded.

The standard PC has some automation (e.g., automated antivirus updates) and may be built from a desktop image, but the organization may require multiple images to satisfy all of its users’ preferences or roles. Upgrades require some interaction between the user and application installer, and in most cases the state and settings on a PC are not preserved when it is replaced.

The rationalized PC is a highly managed device configured for and capable of automatically discovering and installing new applications assigned to the user, any required drivers, and network resources such as printers, and can automatically resolve application incompatibilities. The rationalized PC is built from a layered image, in which drivers, line-of-business applications, the OS core, and configurable OS features can be independently incorporated into the image and patched or upgraded independently as required.