Vista versions and Higher Education environments

I have delivered/attended a number of Vista presentations and demos this year with customers in Higher Education.  One question has consistently been asked in every forum, and that is “which version of Vista will be right for us?”

First, I’ll provide a link to the version information for Vista:

https://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/versions/default.mspx

There are 5 versions given here and let’s remember nothing has shipped yet.  From the site we can derive that there is a consumer line and a business line.  Within each there are versions with a range of features available.

Most of the large University customers I work with have a Campus Agreement in place.  With the right provisions this allows your faculty/staff and maybe even students to install which ever version they feel is right for them.  I anticipate that people will want the version with the most “stuff” available, so Ultimate and Enterprise.  Over the next few months and as more information becomes publicly available I hope to address more of these types of questions such as how each will be deployed, managed, and supported and what specific features might drive a user towards one or the other.