2012 r2 series: customer scenario centricity

well, guess what? r2 is coming. you knew that already. what you might not know yet is r2 is coming october 18, along with windows 8.1. brad anderson has also been releasing a series of blog posts to highlight all of the forthcoming changes.

it’s a lot of material to read! figured i’d read along and post the high points. obviously i’m way behind since it’s a 9-part series which started at the beginning of july and is up to part 7 already. enough exasperation. let’s get started with part 1 titled beginning and ending with customer-specific scenarios.

• cloud-first approach. build and deploy in their cloud first then deliver to customers and partners. ms currently operates > 200+ cloud services.
• unified planning. client, server, system center, azure and intune all planned and prioritized together, including common release schedules and milestones.
• three core pillars. centric to the support and inspiration behind r2 products:
• empower people-centric IT (pcit). a move toward answering consumerization. users work anywhere on any device while operating in a secure and managed fashion. push to greater self-service capability. single pane of glass for device management.
• transform the datacenter. technology which provides consistency in datacenter and public cloud platforms (investment, skillset, etc.)
• enable modern business apps. new capabilities for both existing and new applications.
• scenario-centric engineering. customer scenarios incorporated into all phases of development to prove the product operates as expected for customers instead of operating to an exact design specification, driven by focusing on:
• plan based on customer needs.
• design great products.
• implement the software/service.
• review scenarios frequently.
• stabilize the software/service.