Firstly, we were expecting it in March but its only landing now. That’s going to be the knock-on from the delays with the problems Microsoft had late last year. That means ”1903” is also referred to as “19H1”.
What does it mean for the average user?
As far as we can tell, there are lots of small things that won’t make a difference individually but cumulatively will have a big impact (if your people know how to use them!).
For example, there is now an icon on the taskbar that shows when you are disconnected from the internet – rather than guessing why things aren’t working :
And there is more on icons – a few have changed, like ‘sleep’, ‘shut down’ and ‘restart’ – mainly cosmetic changes. There’s also a little ‘microphone’ that shows up when you are recording, and the brightness control is now a slider.
We’ve highlighted changes to copy/paste before and the indications are that the content previews are now better than before and you can still copy/paste BETWEEN PCs!
One change that will win back time for all of us is the intelligent ‘focus assist’. This will reduce distractions by stopping alerts from popping up when you are working in anything in fullscreen. You can turn this on or off by selecting ‘When I’m using an app in full screen’
To help Windows run better, there are some security lifts in the product, including a ‘sandbox’ that lets you run untrusted software in an isolated space on your PC, and ‘storage sense’ and ‘reserved storage’ , which reserve space for Windows and App updates on your hard disk.
After the challenges last year, we’re all pleased to see a new feature that lets us delay any update for up to 35 days, even security updates. That’s probably more relevant for home PCs than for business ones. At the same time, there is something called ‘intelligent active hours’ and this will help Microsoft send your updates to you when you aren’t busy working.
There’s a few more new features, but that’s enough to be getting on with.
All these productivity changes are irrelevant if your teams don’t know about them! Talk to us about a session to walk through these and see your people working faster and smarter!