Windows 7 Gives Feeding America More Time

Hello, I’m Olivia Riley Cornejo, and starting today I’ll be blogging about the experiences some of our commercial customers (large and small) are having in their Windows 7 deployments. Hopefully their stories will help answer questions you may be having about migrating to Windows 7 in your own environment and inspire you to try it for yourself. Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter @ORCornejo.

The first customer I’d like to highlight is Feeding America, a hunger-relief charity with food banks across the United States. I’m sure you’ve heard of the amazing work they do to help feed millions of people every year. As you can imagine, this great work also has the potential to be quite challenging logistically without the right equipment. The organization turned to Windows 7 to help maximize productivity and give employees more time to focus on their job instead of focusing on how they’ll do their jobs.

With more than 4,000 employees across a network of over 200 food banks and a national office, Feeding America can’t afford to be bogged down with endless IT issues. With Windows 7’s ease of use, Feeding America can focus on what really matters – getting food to people in need. The Feeding America team tells me that Windows 7 has been easy for employees to understand quickly, and the IT department doesn’t receive a lot of “how do I do this?” questions. The collective favorite feature is Snap – Feeding America employees like being able to compare documents side by side.

Patrick Whalen, the IT Infrastructure Manager for Feeding America, is pleased with the deployment and loving the benefits of Windows 7:

I absolutely recommend Windows 7 for other non-profit organizations. It doesn’t have needy hardware requirements and can run on older machines so it’s very affordable.

Because the reception and deployment have been so successful, Feeding America just received approval to deploy Windows 7 across 20 additional food banks next year. Here at Microsoft, we’re hoping that having the latest and greatest in technology will really allow them to be as efficient as possible and help even more people.

Especially right now, it’s more important than ever to donate to Feeding America with kids out of school for the summer and some not getting the full meals they received during the school year. I just donated online and it takes less than a minute!

To learn more about Feeding America’s deployment experience with Windows 7, read Microsoft’s case study.