Today's employees are constantly on the road, working from just about anywhere but the office. Their productivity (and their companies' strategic competitive advantage) depends on their access to a comprehensive range of corporate resources.

Flexible Workstyle solutions enable you to travel any place and use your corporate PC or tablet securely. As long as you have an internet connection, you'll have access to the same corporate resources you would if you were in the office. Office Lync provides one-click access to colleagues using instant message, or a phone call through a secure corporate network. SkyDrive and your personal Live account keep you connected and able to share with family and friends when you travel.

Flexible Workstyle solutions enable corporate IT to provide secure remote access and an authentication infrastructure based on Direct Access technology that supports the full range of corporate requirements and protocols. Windows Direct Access connects employees to the corporate resources they need through an encrypted connection tunnel wherever they have access to a mobile broadband network or Wi-Fi hotspot. Policy settings ensure that employee devices are scanned and that anti-virus software is up-to-date and malware free before access is granted. And employee devices can be maintained in a state of constant compliance with corporate IT requirements through remote monitoring, patching, and provisioning.

Today's employees juggle hectic schedules and endless responsibilities. Even on vacation or during personal time, they often need to keep tabs on their work life. And more and more people are using personal devices—especially tablets—to keep a finger on the office pulse.

Flexible Workstyle solutions make it easy to use your favorite personal device for work via web apps, remote apps, remote desktops, or virtual desktops anywhere you have an internet connection. To connect to work using your tablet, just tap the remote access icon on the screen, log in, and open your virtual desktop with all the same data, applications, and settings you have access to in your office.

Whatever personal device employees prefer to use to make them more efficient and productive, Flexible Workstyle solutions offer fast, secure browsing and a rich user experience. At the same time, it enables corporate IT to maintain centralized management of applications and data while ensuring enhanced security and compliance.

"Phoning it in" used to be a bad thing. Not anymore. Today, smart companies recognize that smartphones are powerful productivity tools. And more and more tech-savvy employees consider their smartphones indispensible to the way they work and live. Companies need secure flexible solutions that facilitate the modern, mobile workstyle/lifestyle mash-up. Talk is cheap. Productivity is valuable.

Your smartphone is a serious productivity tool—not just for talking and reading, but for writing, editing, and collaborating. Use your Windows 7 phone and Mobile Office to access work email and Office apps. Access and post documents on your company's SharePoint site. Save documents locally in cache mode, and make them available later without having to download them again. If a colleague makes changes to a document, it's updated automatically so you can always have the latest version at your fingertips. Smart.

In the past, security concerns often prevented companies from providing employees smartphone access to sensitive documents. Today, the ability to authenticate and authorize remote users means that IT departments can support mobile access to productivity applications. This means IT has a more important role than ever in helping companies stay competitive by enabling their most tech-savvy employees.

It's not uncommon for employees to switch between any number of laptops or devices as they work in the office, at home, and on the road. The challenge is keeping everything up to date and in sync so that data, applications, and settings are consistent and everything works the way it should, wherever and however the work gets done.

Flexible Workstyle solutions deliver a personalized, rich, and consistent user experience—whether you're working online or offline. Your apps, data, and settings go where you go, instead of being tied down to just one PC or device. So you can work the way you want to, not the way you have to.

With the roaming user profile, folder redirection, and offline cache built into Windows 7, settings and data can be automatically stored on a corporate server and made available locally in cache on employee devices so they can access them even without an internet connection. Employees' latest settings and documents are right there when they log in, no matter what PC or device they're using.

To ensure that employees always have access to updated applications that are compliant with corporate requirements, IT can take advantage of application virtualization. When an employee logs into one of their computers or devices, a software agent automatically populates the screen with icons for the applications they have access to. With a click, the most current version of an application streams to their computer and is cached locally for their use. No applications are ever physically installed on their machine.

It used to take multiple systems to support multiple devices in an organization. The multi-system approach was expensive and time consuming to build and maintain; it did not ensure adequate levels of control over employee access to corporate resources; it provided no way to know which device belonged to which user; and it was nearly impossible to assess data usage and ensure data security. Today, the challenge is even greater because of the proliferation of devices and the complexity associated with managing them.

With Flexible Workstyle solutions, you can use a single centralized tool to manage updates, identity, and security across all user devices. You gain increased security and compliance and better visibility into the devices on the network. Application delivery is user focused and dependent on device and network capabilities. Simply put, Flexible Workstyle solutions offer you a unified, consistent experience that makes device management easier for IT.

Using Flexible Workstyle solutions with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012, IT personnel can support almost any type of device—from Windows PCs and tablets to non-Windows devices, and more—on one platform and manage it all from a single console view. The integration of Microsoft's Forefront endpoint security solution means IT doesn't need a parallel anti-virus software management infrastructure.

Most important, because Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012 is designed around a user-centric management model, IT can structure access, authentication, authorization, and reporting so that each device accessing the corporate network is associated with a specific employee. This gives IT personnel fine-grained control over the resources each employee can use. With Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012, IT personnel simply set up corporate data policy based on devices and users' roles and it automatically applies across the company's entire IT infrastructure. This enables IT teams to implement application provisioning policies that control application and data access at appropriate levels for different roles within the company, automatically adjusted for the capabilities of different types of devices.

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012 also gives IT teams access to comprehensive reporting that lets them know who is accessing the corporate network, for how long, and on which devices.

Most companies today employ many contractors who use their own PCs on and off site. To be productive, these contractors need to access corporate resources. The challenge for IT personnel is to ensure that these personal PCs comply with corporate IT policy, but without forcing the company to pay for software licenses it doesn't need. And because contractor turnover tends to be high, IT departments often don't want to add them to the corporate directory services.

Flexible Workstyle solutions can help you meet the challenges associated with a contractor workforce. Cloud Management for Windows PC's and Slates means no on-premise infrastructure is required. So you always have the latest features; monitoring and reporting are easy; and you can manage security and updates from anywhere there's an internet connection.

Flexible Workstyle solutions with Windows Intune offers an online solution that enables IT personnel to manage security and updates for every computer that accesses corporate resources—including machines that aren't joined to the corporate domain—without setting up multiple tools and servers, or paying on a per-seat per-month basis.

With Intune, IT personnel can log on to a single management console from any location and manage deployment of updates and services packs for all non-domain PCs. They can manage update, firewall, and endpoint protection policies for all of these devices, even when they are outside the corporate firewall. Intune enables IT teams to deploy Microsoft Malware Protection Engine so that all machines that access the corporate network have the latest anti-malware software. And it allows them to track hardware and software inventory to efficiently manage corporate licenses.

Windows Intune gives IT personnel the ability to provide remote assistance to resolve PC issues for contractors who telecommute, as long as they are connected to the internet. It also provides access to features in Windows 7 Enterprise Edition, such as bitlocker encryption, that help ensure that data is safe even if a device that is not jointed to the domain is lost.

All over the world, companies are trying to find ways to do more with less. Optimized Infrastructure for VDI can help, by enabling companies to reduce server infrastructure investment and make their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure more cost effective.

Optimized Infrastructure for VDI enables you to support more users with the same hardware; create a better user experience with less disruption; and reduce network bandwidth requirements.

Optimized Infrastructure for VDI is a multifaceted solution that can help reduce datacenter capital investments. For example, taking advantage of the dynamic memory capability provided by Hyper-V, IT personnel can pool available physical memory on host servers and dynamically allocate memory to virtual machines based on real-time workload requirements. This provides more efficient use of physical memory resources so that more virtual machines can run simultaneously on a virtualization host without hampering performance.

In addition, if every virtual machine is dynamically provisioned using application virtualization (which uses an app-V agent rather than physically installing applications in the image), then IT personnel only need to save a few image templates. To access an application, users simply click on the associated icon which is then automatically populated on logon based on their user profile, and the application is streamed from an app server to the virtual machine.

Shared Cache capability means that applications don't need to be streamed multiple times for different virtual machines. This saves storage on the VDI server, reduces network bandwidth requirements, and delivers virtual performance that nearly replicates the experience of running applications locally. And with ready-only Shared Cache, IT personnel can further reduce storage requirements by using the same cache across server hosts on the SAN network.

With the cost savings from reduced data center capital investments on servers, network, and storage, IT teams can support VDI more broadly to enable employees to securely access a well-managed corporate desktop over the Internet from anywhere on any device.