The CIS Sandbox is sponsoring a Windows 8 Launch party on Monday at 5pm with Microsoft. The IT Client Services department just issued a statement about the use of Windows 8 at Bentley to faculty, staff, and students:
Client Services has received many questions regarding the launch of Microsoft Windows 8. At this time, you should not install Windows 8 on your Bentley issued computer. This installation is a complete reformat of your hard drive and will remove you from the Bentley domain, remove access to printers, remove access to mapped drives and result in the failure of your anti-virus software, Forefront.
Client Services is closely watching the launch of Windows 8. At this time, we know that there are driver and software compatibility issues. We are in contact with our software vendors and plan on moving to Windows 8 when access and stability to your academic and administrative applications are in place.
I want to make clear that our plan on Monday is to show you how to run Windows 8 in a virtual environment on your machine. This will not compromise your Windows 7 installation. The CIS Sandbox supports the message from Client Services. Students are not permitted to install Windows 8 on their Bentley laptops for precisely the reasons mentioned in the memo above. In every communication I have had with Microsoft about planning this event, I made clear that Bentley does not yet support Windows 8, and as such, if we are to provide Windows 8 to students for testing and evaluation, it has to be as an application that they can run on top of the Windows 7 computing environment.
We invite you to join us on Monday.
Mark Frydenberg
Director, CIS Sandbox
