I’ve been an early adopter since the days of Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Yes. Way back in the Dark Ages of the early 90s.
Microsoft’s newest efforts have always received my close scrutiny. I’ve gone through the painful move to 32-bit with Windows 95, the abomination that was Windows Me, the bloated Windows Vista which made XP look like a heavyweight champ, and of course Windows 7 which righted the ship and paved the way for the newly released Windows 8.
Staying true to form, I couldn’t wait to put Windows 8 through the paces. I’ve been testing it with everything from BillQuick Web Suite to Rovio’s Angry Birds, in addition to simultaneously testing Microsoft 2013. I like to multitask.
In exploring the new tablet-friendly OS, I’ve concluded, my fellow BillQuick users and early adopters, that you should resist the urge to dive into the Windows 8 waters, for the moment.
My First Day with Windows 8
I got off to a good start on my first day with Windows 8. The upgrade process was pretty straight forward. That was a big relief. I didn’t need system issues on my end while I was trying to resolve my customers’ issues.
After installing Windows 8, I started my day as usual. I found BillQuick easy enough–I can spot that blue square clock anywhere–fired up BillQuick and opened some other programs and documents. But where is everything else? IIS (Internet Information Services) was installed somewhere. I looked for it in the Control Panel. Wait, where was the Control Panel? All I saw was a fancy looking screen with tiles. And there was no start button. Okay, I stayed cool and I glided the mouse into the bottom left corner and there it was….Metro!
Next, I opened Internet Explorer to research how to open the Control Panel. Wait. What’s this? IE 10 looked different too. Eventually I figured out how to open it and save the link as a Metro tile. I was on my way to Windows 8 dominance!
Alright, with the new OS installed, I was ready to take some support calls. I followed along in BillQuick, as usual, as I explained troubleshooting processes to callers, easy enough. One call required me to open an email sent by a customer regarding a reports question. No problem. I’ll just open my email, I thought to myself. Uh oh, where was it? Okay. Outlook has a different icon; oops, I mean tile. I found the email eventually. All of a sudden I was thinking maybe I wasn’t the Windows 8 guru I thought I was.
First Impressions
Windows 8 and its new metro interface make for a pretty picture, almost fit for an art gallery–take that iPad. Personally, I find Metro to be an exciting new interface. Its speed and performance, thankfully, aren’t noticeably different from Windows 7. Additionally, it works well in a multi-monitor setup.
That said, beware the learning curve. I’m still learning. Recently, in a Best Buy store, a salesman actually taught me something, a rarity. He showed me how to close the Metro menu by dragging it from the top down. Be prepared to sacrifice some productivity while learning the new interface.
Some Final Words of Advice
I know BillQuick users always want to keep rolling, without interruption. That’s why you selected BillQuick as your time and project management software. And as someone with an administrative background, I can appreciate spending less time on accounting and management and more time actually providing services to your customers.
That’s why the BQE Support Team and myself are recommending you to hold off using BillQuick in a Windows 8 environment, at least until we have gone through more testing. It may work fine for some users but there may be issues for others, depending on their operating environment.
No worries though; someday soon we’ll all be happily ‘tapping’ our time entries into BillQuick on our Windows 8 PCs and mobile devices.
