This report outlines Forrester’s guidance for developing a business case to justify a BYOD program to support your workforce computing strategy. Supporting the growing number and increasing diversity of mobile devices used for work is particularly challenging for I&O executives. Results of Forrester’s Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, Q2 2012 show that more than two-thirds of North American and European information workers personally choose the smartphones and tablets they use for work, and that 46% of employees personally choose work laptops that are not on the company-approved device list. To address this trend, I&O professionals are developing BYOD programs to support smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. Justifying the ongoing investment in these programs requires I&O execs to capture the comprehensive costs, benefits, and impacts of BYOD program implementation across the corporation. Although many I&O pros are currently developing BYOD programs, our interviews with I&O execs indicate that often they have not captured the end-to-end benefits, costs, and impacts. This report contains a comprehensive list of benefits and costs associated with deploying a BYOD program and highlights examples of the positive impacts your BYOD program can have throughout the organization.

The purpose of this guide is to provide practical, concrete steps that allow you to efficiently incorporate employee-owned devices into your deployment while securing and protecting corporate infrastructure and data.

Microsoft will end support for Windows XP on the 8th April 2014. Organizations that have not started a migration to Microsoft Windows 7 will need to do so quickly or lose support for one of the most important technologies in the enterprise desktop environment. There are two options for customers after this date; either take the significant risk (see the whitepaper on Windows XP EoL: The risk of not migrating) or pay for a custom support agreement. This paper discusses the potential costs of End of Life (EoL) custom support agreements based on historical data in the public domain and options to rapidly avoid these costs.

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IT organizations are on the brink of a new wave of desktop transformation, with Windows 7 operating system (OS) migrations a critical stop on the journey. These OS migrations are extremely complex and pose real risks in terms of enduser downtime, business interruptions, and increased costs. IT needs to ensure migration projects go quickly and smoothly, and that the resulting user environment becomes easier to access and manage. For most companies, Windows 7 migrations are part of an enterprise-wide desktop evolution that may include any combination of desktop virtualization, server-based computing and application virtualization. With this in mind, businesses can benefit from using a Windows 7 project as an opportunity to re-examine strategies and solutions for ongoing desktop and user management. By taking advantage of RES Workspace Manager and RES Baseline Desktop Analyzer, not only can organizations ensure a relatively rapid, pain-free and successful transition to Windows 7, but they can also enhance the end-user experience and enable simpler desktop transformations in the future. Windows 7 migrations conducted today can, in fact, be designed to greatly ease the pathway of future migrations. Windows 8, for example, is not far away; and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiatives may be expanding in the future as well.