IT Pro Momentum Results – Anon Company 9
Public disclosure of your name and company name allowed? (Yes or No) No, thank you.
Objectives of the project: What problem did you set out to solve? Research and see if implementing Windows 7 would be a viable option for my customers. In general, test Windows 7 to see the ease of deployment and usability for end users. Verify certain bugs, and report them.
Are you piloting or deploying the products? I realize you are likely piloting first, but just let me know if you plan to move forward into a production deployment. Piloting, at the moment. Testing to see if the deployment phase into a live environment would work (i.e ease of moving users from Windows XP into a Windows 7 environment) Still working on usability for end users as it is a pretty big gap to go from Windows XP into a 7 enviroment.
Products used in the project (all that apply): Windows 7
Project description: Windows 7 seems to be a much more robust system than Windows Vista, and possibly XP. I’ve ran numerous testing rigs with the OS (32 and 64 bit) with no major hiccups (Virtual PC seems to need some work with compatibility with it’s network driver). I’ve seen a lot less use of system resources with this OS than previous versions of Windows, although it’s a tough race with XP as I haven’t ran down specific tests between the two. The install of the OS is very smooth and took me generally less than 15 minutes on any system I installed it on. UAC is a lot less annoying than it was in Vista, actually I left it enabled during my Windows 7 testing as the majority of it never bothered me, unlike Vista! The system I have tested it on, I was happy to see that they actually located the RAID drivers and anything I had installed on the machine. Although some were generic drivers, they still worked fine.
Were the objective stated at the beginning satisfied? Did you solve the problem? No real problem to solve as this was more a test phase than anything. The objectives are definitely satisfied, however I am still testing so I can’t give you a COMPLETE run down of everything, but so far things are smooth.
Are you going to save money? How much over how many years? This still has yet to be determined as costs associated with training end users on a new O/S is up in the air. So honestly I can’t answer this one.
What do you think about the IT Pro Momentum program? Would you have done this project without the IT Pro Momentum program? Any suggestions for improvements are appreciated. This is a great program that gives both ways. We get to use MS products and we in turn give you the feedback we encounter using the products. I think this helps IT people out to determine what they can and can’t use in their particular environment. I believe having access to Technet is a HUGE feature to give people to give MS feedback about their products, as I stated it’s a give-give relationship which works well for both sides. I would suggest however, that the Technet sub. be done a little faster, as sometimes access to the products that we want to test we don’t have access to( I think I am waiting still to get my Technet sub activated.)