Vista Springboard.....

Ya know......we (Microsoft) have taken a lot of heat for the past year and a half on Vista. A year ago I heard the rumblings and I shook my head because much of what was being said rang true. Now we are at Vista SP1 and much of what people have complained about is resolved. However, many of the every day people I speak to that complain about Vista have never actually used Vista...or....they used Vista a year ago. They saw a TV commercial or heard a friend or co-worker bad mouth Vista and decided that was good enough for them. The same holds true for many IT Pros I speak to - they evaluated it a year ago, ran into a few problems, and decided to stick with XP. Now we are a year and a half after RTM, SP1 has been available for 5 months, but many of the people that I spoke to a year ago haven't taken a second look. vista

They don't know that many of the application compatibility issues have been resolved.

They don't know that User Account Control has been updated to be less pervasive.

They don't know BitLocker has been updated and there are new recovery tools.

They don't know how much faster disk-to-disk and network files transfers are.

There are many other updates as well. You can read about them here.

 

Now that's not to say that for IT Pros they can just drop a Vista DVD into a server, share it out and deploy a few thousands seats with ease. There is a planning and deployment process that should be managed. But that isn't anything new. IT Pros had to do that a decade ago when moving from Win 3.1 to Windows 95.

To that end, there is a relatively new portal to help IT Pro's who would like to evaluate and deploy Vista for their environments. The new Vista Springboard site has prescriptive guidance on exploring new and updated features of Vista, testing it in a lab setting, testing the compatibility of your apps, and deploying and finally managing it on a day to basis.

If you haven't take a look at Vista in a while (or maybe you have never loaded it!) take a look at the Springboard site, read up and get familiar with Vista, then let me know if it is enough or if it is even the right stuff.

 

Cheers!