Intel's Compute Sticks stick it to Windows To Go, Chromecast

Stick it where it fits

Most technical people in business don’t want more devices to worry about, as each time a new one is introduced, a mad rush ensues in the background to try and crowbar the solution in – often based on an executive’s whim. Many new devices bring in new issues, and devices like iPads still aren’t fully managed like a desktop (ever tried remotely supporting an iPad?).

The good news is that the ICS makes very little change to a business that’s already looking after Windows PCs. The ability to deploy an image via USB booting, add drivers and install an agent such as Microsoft’s Configuration Manager for ongoing management makes it more ‘drop in’ than some other solutions.

Comparing it to Microsoft’s Windows To Go USB stick idea, this is marginally better. You don’t get the grunt of a full PC still, and since you’re providing your own PC instead, you just need a display, mouse and keyboard. For the businesses who have adopted Windows To Go, this could eliminate the need to refresh many of the PCs of the lower power users.

A smaller scale business can just plug and play the device. It won’t connect to an Active Directory domain because it’s running Windows 8.1 with Bing - but treated like a BYOD it will give its user an easy way to plug into a screen or laptop dock and hit the ground running.

The bad news is it’s hard to find an area where the ICS excels, and is a best fit for a problem that needs a solution. For the current iteration of the ICS, there are still some niche uses it will cover reasonably well. As long as they’re filling a small scale need, they provide an easy way of just getting something up and running – such as digital signage on a single screen.

Going large scale is a much harder sell. There’s no PXE booting, so you can’t easily drop your SOE onto many devices, or re-image easily. As mentioned earlier, Active Directory (AD) along with group policies and user management isn’t out of the box on the device, so you’ll need to re-image with a different and paid for version of Windows to provide that functionality, along with other utilities that will need access an AD connected computer would already have, to deploy management clients on the device.

For thin clients, the above makes the ICS a decent ad-hoc type solution, but not a business solution because the machine doesn't lend itself to automation.

This is not to say that the device is ‘bad’. It is good, and does what it says – just don’t expect it to be the choice to drop into 500 screens to provide thin clients in a company.