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Metro is not just for consumer devices, it is perfect for Enterprises

A lot of tech media and bloggers said Metro may not be suitable for enterprise market when Microsoft released developer preview of Windows 8 few days back, but in fact the opposite is true. Metro with its capability of Live Tiles and Push notifications can take the Enterprise Architecture to next level. Think about an enterprise that has lot of investment in services and a roadmap to migrate towards SOA Adoption enterprise wide, it is very easy for them to just adopt to Metro UI. Metro is very good candidate to take advantage of SOA. Enterprises can fully leverage Push Notifications, Asynchronous Web Service calls, which are default in Metro style interfaces, Business Intelligence (BI) applications, Field Applications that involve heavy and live forms for data processing, data presentation can take advantage of Metro totally.

I briefly give few examples how Metro can be used in these scenarios successfully. Think about a BI Dashboard, which is used by corporate executives, sales and marketing teams for their presentations with board and clients respectively, or to check various market situations at a given time, In those scenarios, a dashboard can be easily built with Metro Language and take advantages of Push Notifications for any updates to the underlying datasets, services easily. The integration between the dashboard and the underlying services becomes so easy and the Asynchronous way of handling the services, which is default in Metro style devices (Windows Phone, and Windows 8), will eliminate a lot of hassles in the integration scenarios.

Now think about field staff such as Police Officers, Park Rangers, Rural Hospitals etc., They need to fill good number of forms – offline and online, and validate a lot of information while handling the requests such as giving tickets, validating the permits, working on patients information etc. Sometimes they need to handle large volume of dataset. In those scenarios, we could leverage the power of private clouds and local storage. The local storage can be updated with various methods. Also we could alert the user whenever there is an update to the underlying services and datasets by sending push notifications. This way we could use hybrid application architecture satisfying the patterns for Smart Client.

Metro is very useful in a lot of scenarios apart from the above. The enterprises that are moving towards SOA adoption and private/public clouds can fully utilize the power of Metro. Of course this can be achieved with other platforms such as iOS and Android, but Metro has in-built integration facilities and default Asynchronous way of handling web services and management environment make it powerful use case for developing loosely coupled applications and enterprise application integration situations.

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