Many organizations are undergoing digital transformation, and modernizing the workplace is often a stream within the wider strategy. In order to manage remote and multi-device workforces using DAAS, you should think about the following seven benefits and how this will change, and hopefully improve, your currently way of working.

1) The modern workplace
Digital transformation is redefining what we think about the workplace. At the heart of this evolution is technology and the introduction of digital-first natives into the workplace.

The millennial is no longer the office junior but is now the manager. By 2020, the millennial employee (those born between 1981 and 1996) is forecasted to comprise half of the global workforce, and by 2025, they will make up 75 per cent of it.

Millennials expect workplace technology to work as good as or better than their own devices. They are comfortable with technology and count on their employers to provide them with the tools they need to do their job. Allowing staff to work remotely and via their own devices is a surefire way to attract and retain the best talent.

2) Cost
As with many cloud initiatives, DaaS moves costs from CAPEX to OPEX, leaving you more cash in the bank to spend on growing your business. Per desktop pricing enables you to know exactly what workforce expansion will cost the IT department, removing unforeseen infrastructure or hardware purchases as this is handled by the provider, who bundle everything in with the price of each desktop.

Virtual machines use the compute power of the data centre rather than their local machines, placing less demand on the endpoint. This means that, by using fast virtual desktops, you can extend your organisation’s desktop and laptop refresh cycle, offering a secondary means of reducing costs by keeping endpoints in action for longer. Users who are entirely office-based can be switched onto low maintenance zero clients (also known as thin clients) which have no local OS or storage. You can even go as far as bringing in a bring your own device (BYOD) policy, where staff are expected to use personal hardware to access corporate resources, which is particularly useful if your organisation promotes remotes working.

3) Scalability
Due to the ‘…as a service’ delivery model, DAAS enables you to add user workstations fast and easily. This is particularly handy when your organisation utilises contract resource or temporary project teams, as there’s no hardware to procure, meaning you have the flexibility to create a desktop almost instantly and delete it when no longer required. This also puts you in control.

4) Control
DaaS helps you manage the risks that naturally come with giving your staff the freedom to work anywhere and on any device. It enables you to control the essentials such as data access and compliance without being overly restrictive. You no longer have to worry about what data is held on a user’s device as the data remains in the data centre at all times. This gives you control over all company assets because access can be revoked with the touch of a button.

5) Management
With an increasingly dispersed workforce, rolling out new applications or patching existing software has become more of a logistical problem than a technical one.
Trying to coordinate people bringing in physical devices to be patched is a real issue for many companies, something which is eliminated completely with DaaS. You operate on one central image (or a small number of images based on persona), a change is made once, and everyone is on the latest version. It removes the need to standardise builds of end-user compute hardware as DaaS will run on almost any device no matter its configuration.

It is fairly common for me to have a case where I need to present a user with more than one table field, and sometimes a few of them. In most cases the row count for the table fields is small, resulting in a lot of wasted white space in the table field boxes. This makes for a lot of scrolling to get to what a user needs to see or act on. While this would have value anywhere, it would have special importance in workflow tasks. The best handling that I can think of would be to be able to set a number of rows that you would like to have a table field sized to when presented to a user. An alternate method would be to have the table field start at one line presented and then set a maximum number of rows to be reached before stopping its growth and bringing in the scroll bar to access the rest. Either approach would work great and would really help to clean up the user interaction where multiple table fields are being presented.