The NZ Herald’s Mac Planet recently wrote about “Banking on iDevices“. The article heralded what a great job ASB bank had done, providing their staff with iPads to work from, in their deskless environment at the new building near the Viaduct Basin. 1500 iDevices were issued, a third of them were iPads. If iPad users wanted to use Microsoft Office software, they would use a Remote Desktop app to access the applications in a Remote Desktop Services environment.
That’s a logical work around. If the iPad can’t do what you need it to do, Remote Desktop into a Microsoft Windows environment to overcome the iPad shortcomings as a corporate device.
Fantastic, well done. Praise iPad…
Hang on.
If it’s good enough for an iPad to use Remote Desktop, it’s also good enough for the Surface RT.
I use the Remote Desktop app for Windows 8 and it works very well. It responds well to touch, placing the cursor where I want to type, selecting icons and buttons as well as if it were a mouse, dragging a page to scroll. For all intense purposes, it’s as if I was using my desktop computer at work, just on a smaller, portable screen.
But unlike the iPad, the Surface RT runs Office 2013 on the device (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote). I don’t have to remote desktop into a computer/server to use it. I can work from documents stored locally or I can connect to them in cloud storage such as SkyDrive or SharePoint Online/Office 365. I can take plenty of notes and sync them using OneNote, accessing them from other devices and from a browser if need be. I’m using Windows 8.1 Preview, so I also use Outlook 2013 for email.
Most of my ‘apps’ are browser based and there are an increasing number of apps useful for business, available in the Windows 8 App store.
Battery life is great, the keyboard cover is smart and convenient. I could go on… and on…
If Remote Desktop is good enough for iPad users at one of New Zealand’s largest banks, then it’s good enough for the Surface RT.
I think the Surface RT is a more capable, light-duty corporate device and Remote Desktop fills the gap to run other Windows applications.
- Darrell Webster | nz.linkedin.com/in/darrellwebster/ | @DarrellCWebster
