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| Edited By: K V Ramana |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 16, 2018, 06:13 AM IST
As Microsoft hopes to overcome the nightmare of Windows Vista by launching Windows 7, the software major’s Indian engineers are confident that the new operating system would not be a repeat of Vista in terms of user experience.
A team of about 300 engineers of the MS India Development Center (IDC), Hyderabad, which is one of the largest development centres of Microsoft outside the US, was part of the Windows 7 development and several critical components of the new OS were designed and developed by it.
“We are quite confident that the new OS is going to offer a different experience to the users. The IDC team was involved in this effort right from the day one and we had all collaborated with others teams across the globe to work on this project,” Anil Bhansali, general manager, Windows and Windows Live Group, MS IDC, told DNA Money.
Virtual private network (VPN) reconnect, direct access and mobile broadband are the key modules contributed by MS IDC to Windows 7 apart from improving several applications such as calculator and notepad.
The VPN reconnect tunnel feature, developed by the India centre, lets the user stay connected to his corporate network while on the move, even when the underlying internet connection changes. It is standards based and uses the IKEv2 IPSec protocol. It supports additional VPN strategy which allows fallback to SSL in case IKEv2 is blocked by the firewall.
It also provides support for machine certificate-based authentication making it more secure to use. For example, a user could start from fixed Ethernet in the office and then disconnect the laptop and move to the office’s wireless LAN. When the user leaves the office, the laptop could start using general packet radio service (GPRS); when the user arrives home, the laptop could switch to the home wireless LAN.
Direct access is a comprehensive anywhere-access solution that provides corporations with the ability to have seamless end-user connectivity for remote information workers. The vision is to provide remote access that is “just like on the corporate network” so that users can seamlessly access the resources they need while also enabling the IT administrator to have an increased level of remote device management. In a sense, the remote machines are always connected to the corporate network.
Apart from these two features, the MS IDC Windows team has also developed the Mobile Broadband feature in Windows 7, which enables users to connect to the internet, from any location that has cellular connectivity.
Customers can connect via 2.5G, 3G, GSM or CDMA based cellular data services and enjoy the same uniform experience as available to users of Wi-Fi and other broadband technologies.
Apart from the connectivity features, the applets & gadgets team at MSIDC has used several platform technologies including Windows Ribbon, multi-touch, real-time stylus, sensor and location, rich text framework and gadget platform to develop applications such as paint, calculator, wordpad, notepad, sticky notes and gadgets that are an integral part of Windows 7. “We have improved all these gadgets and applets to offer a different experience to the user. Touch is the key word here. Most of these features now come with the touch technology. For instance, if you use paint you can actually paint using your fingers,” Bhansali said.
