Thomas Duryea has deployed Windows 10 for a major real estate and facilities management firm, before the operating system even went into general release last week.
Microsoft partner Thomas Duryea showed off the Brookfield Global Integration Services case study at its Windows 10 launch Friday in Sydney, inviting Brookfield IT director Richard Fox-Smith to speak.
"We took a bit of a risk going for Windows 10 [over Windows 7 or 8.1] because ultimately we wanted to be on the most modern platform. So we thought 'let's go for that!'" said Fox-Smith.
"With TD's help, that risk wasn't really a big risk at all. We've now got a pretty strong SOE that we're happy with."
[Photos: Thomas Duryea customers toast Windows 10]
[Related: Thomas Duryea shows off Win10 with Dell, Microsoft execs]
Fox-Smith told the 150-strong audience that the deployment was for a greenfield site. Active Directory and Office 365 were also rolled out, with virtual servers hosted in the TD cloud.
"Our goal was to have fit-for-purpose IT, so our users are mobile… That led to IT needing to be application-focused, leveraging the cloud as much as we could. We don't want to be managing things we don't need to," he said.
End users have not complained about the new operating system, according to Fox-Smith.
"There's been no resistance whatsoever," he said. "Windows 10 looks familiar – things appear where users expect them to. The feedback has been very positive."
Thomas Duryea general manager Michael Chanter said that the Brookfield case showed Windows 10 and a cloud-first approach has enabled partners to roll out new IT in record time.
"It's starting to become possible to do pretty impressive things. From my perspective, I've never seen an entire corporate IT environment stood up, deployed to users and rolled out in under three months," said Chanter. "That included user migration, authentication and the whole lot."
"The underlying models that support architecture are changing what we can do. That gives [customer CIOs] a lot of agility."
Windows 10 was in Insider testing for months before the start of its phased general release last week.
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