Microsoft Windows 8 may have launched in October, but it wasn’t until just a couple of weeks ago that it officially launched in the Caribbean and Bermuda region. That’s when Microsoft officials were on-island giving professionals in Bermuda’s IT industry a closer look at the new operating system along with a sneak peak of the yet-to-be released Office 2013.Since then, many in the IT industry here have been testing out the technology, thinking about how to implement it in their business, and telling others about the cool new features in Office 2013.George Gobin, Microsoft country manager of Bermuda, Cayman Islands, The Bahamas, Belize and Turks and Caicos told the room full of CIOs, IT managers and self-described geeks that Windows 8 is the PC re-imagined.“If I was asked by every single business person here the question, ‘is Windows 8 for enterprise or is it for the consumer — is it for both?’ My answer is, it’s going to be both,” Mr Gobin said. “Windows 8 is secure, it’s faster, it does every thing that Windows 7 does, it just does it better.”He said the ultimate goal of Windows 8 is to give users the same experience no matter what device they’re using.“What we’re seeing today with the consumerisation of IT is that the consumer is driving the devices they want to use in the workplace. Work is no longer a place that you go to. You can do your work from anywhere. So whatever device you are comfortable with — that is what we are seeing in the industry. Companies are changing their policies to suit what their employees like using in terms of an IT device,” he said.“We now have more than a billion PCs running in the world. Windows 8 has been reimagined for the next billion devices. They’re not all necessarily going to be PCs, but they are going to be devices running various types of operating systems.”Felipe Carillo, Microsoft Office Division Business Owner for the region, said: “In the US, we’ve seen that the average person carries three devices — some even up to four or five. A phone, a tablet, a PC and an e-book reader. Windows 8 allows for all of that to be just one device if you want to — or two — your phone and the rest of the stuff,” Mr Carillo said.“Those devices that we see today are used everywhere. People don’t go to work today — you’re always working. You work anywhere and everywhere,” he said. “So, when designing Windows 8 and Office 2013, we thought about that — you need to be able to work from anywhere from any device.”“Windows 8 is reimagined for the new era which most of you call post-PC era.”After giving a demonstration of the new operating system, Mr Carillo and Mr Gobin invited two local IT professionals to talk about what their experience in using Windows 8 has been like.Serkan Varoglu, a Microsoft MVP and senior consultant at Independent Consulting Solutions here in Bermuda said “bring your own device” is a hot topic as more and more businesses are giving their employees the freedom to chose what devices they want to use for work.“We are buying different devices and we want to use them in our office because we are comfortable with them. We are more productive when we are using devices we’re comfortable with. We don’t just sit at our desks all day and night. If you receive a critical e-mail from work and you need to be able to respond and send an Excel spreadsheet with it, we need be able to do this right away — we can’t wait until tomorrow,” Mr Varoglu said.“For business, we need better solutions and Windows 8 is everything at once. You will have your business and your life all together. It’s the same experience — whatever I see here on my Surface, I see on my laptop.”Mr Varoglu says as an IT person, his greatest concerns are security and how difficult or easy it is to migrate from an old operating system to a new one. He said securing devices is no problem with Windows 8 and that migrating is simple.“The best feature is you don’t have to buy new hardware — I love that. I don’t have to buy a new laptop or desktop to get Windows 8 — I can still run it on the same machine I’m running Windows 7 on. So that is a great feature,” he said. “ And I can assure you if you have done Windows XP to Windows 7 migration, Windows to Windows 7 migration is just too easy.”Eugene O’Connor, vice-president of technology for KeyTech, also spoke about his experience with Windows 8.“I installed Windows 8, got it up and running and I looked at it and said, ‘what the heck is going on here?’ First thing that I looked for was the start button — and there’s no start button,” he said. “So I called George up and said, ‘what have you guys done? You have totally changed the experience’.”“So I said, ‘George — I don’t know what is going on here’, and George arranged a meeting with me the next morning. Within 15 minutes, I was up and running and doing everything that I was doing before.“You can install Windows 8 and run both it and Windows 7 at the same time so I was able to compare my experience. The first thing I did notice is the speed of the start up — guaranteed, I could start up my Windows 7, I could go get a coffee, by the time I came back, Windows was still heating up. With the Windows 8 experience, by the time I sit down and start my machine — in less than a minute, I’m in my applications.”Mr O’Connor said the key to adjusting to Windows 8 is to learn the ‘four corners’ of Windows 8. For example, the lower left corner takes you to your start screen. The right-side corners take you to the ‘charms’ bar or settings panel and the top left corner shows you what applications are open.“Once George showed me the four corners, I was able to do everything I was able to do before,” Mr O’Connor said.“Once you actually learn — I wouldn’t go back — seriously. Just the speed of starting up is important. The other really important thing for myself is the compatibility of the applications. If it runs on Windows 7, it runs on Windows 8.”“The other thing I noticed is — less crashes. I haven’t seen a blue screen yet. Not to say that doesn’t happen, but I haven’t seen it.”“So, in regards to my experience, it has been good — after you get through that initial learning curve.”There might also be a learning curve with the new Office 2013, but from the ooos and ahhhs the demo of the new suite received, it might be worth it.Mr Carillo demonstrated the new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook and there are some pretty amazing new features I think business users are going to like.My personal favourites come in the new version of Outlook with features that will save you time and embarrassment.How many of you have ever sent an e-mail referring to an attachment and forgot to actually attach the file?“If this hasn’t happened to you, you’re lying,” Mr Carillo said. “But watch — this is amazing.”He goes on to compose an e-mail that says, “George, I am attaching a file to this e-mail.” But when he tries to send it to George without attaching the file, up pops a message saying “you may have forgotten to attach a file”.“This is great — how many times have you sent an e-mail without the attachment and it wasn’t until the next day or a couple of days later when you follow up with the person do you realise you never sent the file. You just lost one night, two days of productivity,” Mr Carillo said. “These are quick, simple things that will save your company time and money.”Mr Carillo also demonstrated that when you receive an e-mail asking you to meet someone at a certain time and place — it not only includes a Bing map of where that place is, it also checks your Outlook calendar to see if you’re free or not.Other interesting features the IT professionals in the audience seemed to like were the real-time collaboration features in Word which let users in different parts of the world edit documents together and chat about it in the process.But the biggest wow factor came during the demo of the new Excel with a new feature called ‘Flash Fill’. When you take an element of data that you’ve already entered in one column and enter it into a second column, Flash Fill will predict that you intend to do that for ever value in that second column and will offer to fill in the entire second column for you accordingly. It will certainly save a lot of typing and errors — especially if you have a 10,000 row workbook you’re working on.Microsoft has also added some new whizz-bang data-analysis tools that do the thinking and calculating for you. Gone are the days of tedious and complex pivot tables. Now, you just highlight all the data you want analysed, and go to the bottom right corner where you can select quick analysis and you can choose the table you want. It predicts how you might want to add up the data or analyse it in other ways and pops up different graphs accordingly. It essentially does all the thinking and math for you.“Think about your non-power users and how easy it makes it,” Mr Carillo said.Office 2013 became available for businesses last month. General availability for consumers is planned for the first quarter of next year.