A warm welcome to all who are joining us for this April edition of the Readiness newsletter. I hope that everyone had a chance to get a break over the past few days – and maybe even get a little time outside.
What’s happening at Readiness
While it may be the year of efficiency for some, the past month has seen a focus on optimization for Readiness. After successfully completing a Windows 11 migration assessment for one of our partners, we were able to take a little time, and focus on a few key elements of the packaging process: repackaging.
Anyone building or using Microsoft over the past few years will know (and feel some pain/sympathy) that Azure is a very dynamic platform—many enhancements and improvements are great—however, there is an associated cost of continual development and ensuring that our development libraries match Microsoft’s. One of these big changes for our team was creating the code-base to access the Azure VM spot-market. With a huge decrease in cost (more than 90%) we are now able to use multi-core, high-memory machines that would have been previously out of reach. This means that our Discovery, Conversion, Repackaging and Testing process are now:
- 2x times faster
- 4x more storage and memory (to handle those larger applications – Thank you AutoCAD)
- infinitely more stable (hard to measure, but things are so much better now)
This should now put on a path to massive scale-outs for large testing, conversion and repackaging efforts.
Partner Spotlight
Our partner spotlight is on SCC for this April update. SCC is a core partner for Readiness as they deliver managed services, application packaging and testing to their UK and European clients. Readiness delivered (in partnership) with SCC a rapid assessment of one of their premier client’s application portfolios in record time. Not just was the entire project delivered on time and on budget, but the client was so impressed that they decided to engage both Readiness and SCC for future assessment efforts. Good job SCC!
Industry News
Windows 11 is still experiencing issues with local security restrictions after last month’s March Patch Tuesday with some users reporting error messages, “Local Security Authority protection is off. Your device may be vulnerable”. This bug was not addressed with the April update from Microsoft (KB5025239 & KB5025224) and still remains a problem. After Microsoft’s “successful” introduction of OpenGPT AI into their search engine Bing, Microsoft will integrate AI suggestions into OneNote via Copilot which help with things like:
- Create a plan for my son’s college admission process.
- Summarize notes into bullet points on a new page.
- Generate a list of topics and talking points for a quarterly team meeting.
- Plan a summer trip to Hawaii for me, my spouse, and our two young children.
The team at Readiness things these ideas and AI integrations are great – but a little help planning our Windows 11 migration or patch deployment would be very much appreciated.
Our Latest Readiness Blog Postings
We are now posting quite regularly on our Application Readiness blog. Here are a few links to our most recent posting:
- Patch Tuesday: The day after
- Patch now to address a Windows zero-day
- Testing Guidance for April Patch Tuesday
- Assurance Security Dashboard April 2023
You can also find all of the Readiness blog posting here and Greg’s ComputerWorld Patch Tuesday postings here.
If you are interested in finding more about application packaging, conversion and automated testing, feel free to contact us.