Windows 10 - Home vs Pro

IT in many smaller businesses starts with the company owners personal laptop. When they take on their first member of staff they pop down PC world and buy a laptop off the shelf for them. Both these machines are setup as if they were personal machines and not configured for business. There's a pretty high chance both will be running Windows 10 Home.

This may happen a few times and then a member of staff leaves. When you go to hand the company laptop over to the new hire who is replacing them, you realise it's setup for the old member of staffs personal details. The old member of staff has the passwords and understandably may be less than keen to share passwords to their personal accounts.

Windows 10 Pro costs about £100 more than the home edition. When you look at the feature comparisons you may not at first see who value in the extra £100 spend.

What that £100 buys you is the ability to manage the device as a business device. Combined with Microsoft 365, you can log into a Windows 10 Pro device with your business email address and password. The device can be managed by the business and most importantly when a member of staff leaves, you can change their password and log in. Any new member of staff can also log into the same laptop with their company email address. No need for the device to be reconfigured.

This makes your company equipment easily portable between users and in fact even gives you the option to allow staff visiting a location to log into any laptop or PC that is free.

Microsoft 365

This is all made possible by Microsoft 365. The management features you have access to will depend on your license level (see our blog here on Microsoft 365 licensing).

Microsoft 365 is a Software as a Service product (read more about why they're a good idea here), which means that you purchase it on a subscription basis and pay only for the number of users you have. Meaning you can scale it easily as your business grows.

Microsoft 365 is not just about access to the Office applications and email. It also gives you a platform to manage all your users, their email, store your files and manage access.

As your business starts out, these management features will be less of a concern, but as you grow and you take on more staff, you'll likely want to section off parts of your data to ensure that only those that need access to it have it. Requirements to ensure your data is secure will become more important as you delegate more responsibility. Microsoft 365 gives you the power to do this. Combined with Windows 10 Pro it creates a near seamless experience for your users accessing their resources.

Please get in touch if you're facing any of the challenges mentioned here. We would be very happy to talk about how Microsoft 365 and Window 10 Pro may help. You can book a free 1 hour consultation with our team here, or give us a call on 01252 918 990.