WP7 for Both Consumers and Enterprise Users

WP7 for both consumers and enterprise users

Microsoft has made WP7 work well for both consumers and enterprise. Consumers get a good user experience right out of the box that they can then personalize with Live Tiles. Consumers will also get a streaming music service based on Microsoft's Zune efforts.

I believe that WP7 will be received well in the enterprise for a number of reasons, including:

Microsoft Office: Right out of the box, WP7 will support the opening and editing of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in a mobile edition of MS Office.

Outlook: Because Outlook is included as well, enterprise users who are already using Exchange or Outlook will get a friendly, familiar UI for e-mail.

OneNote: This is a note-taking application that has seen very little adoption in the desktop but may find a much larger following in WP7, especially when joined with sharing of notes from a meeting with co-workers.

Security: Microsoft has invested a great deal of effort "under the covers" to incorporate end-to-end security to make sure that enterprise IT professionals will be comfortable deploying WP7.

Enterprise Development: Microsoft has provided the same development tools that many enterprises have used to create mobile applications.

Personally, I would have preferred if Microsoft had made a further separation from Windows by calling the new platform Microsoft Phone (with different version numbers) so that they could then have Windows 7 (for desktop and laptops) and then Phone 7, without the reference to Windows (for phones).