Network Admins - who is rolling out Windows 7!

MrGuvernment

MrGuvernment

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Aug 3, 2004
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just wanted to ask if anyone is taking the dive in?

I have been using the RC on my work rig since it came out, all of our work applications work like a dream on it, have some new systems to build and was planning to wait until i can get windows 7 to do them all instead of buying vista.


I have 2 in a VM which i have connected to our domain, worked flawlessly, havent played with many policies yet though...

Anyone else jumping ship?

Anyone who has primarly XP and may use the VM coming with WIndows 7?
 
I work for a school system. You can pretty much guess the answer there. Hell we are still on XP.
 
roaf85 said:
I work for a school system. You can pretty much guess the answer there. Hell we are still on XP.
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I totally here you. My company is so cheap the majority of our systems are XP Home! :rolleyes:
 
i guess i am lucky, since we just moved to a new office and basically starting a whole new company from the ground up and i am the one and only network admin :).

I assume the school just doesnt want to spend any money, or simply doesnt have it... imagine how many less headaches they would have if they moved off of xp!
 
I only use whatever operating systems that come with the computers I purchase for the company. Basically we have some older laptops running XP Pro, current ones running Vista Business, and when available, I'll be purchasing laptops that come with Win7 Pro.

It's much easier this way as every computer has it's own recovery disk made specifically for themselves.

I do have Win7 evaluation from Technet to make sure all of our software work first - and they do.
 
roaf85 said:
I work for a school system. You can pretty much guess the answer there. Hell we are still on XP.
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You work for a school system, so you should have volume licensing. Beyond the man hours, there shouldn't be any cost.

I also work for a school system. I am rolling out Windows 7 this upcoming summer. It runs great on our cheap ass P4 desktops. However our faculty laptop lease is up this summer, so the laptops should run Win 7 awesomely.

The hard part is updating all of our VMs to Server 2008 over the duration of the school year without breaking anything.
 
Not this budget year, but likely the next ( 10-11 ). We aren't slated to replace any workstations this year, but if we get our budget for next year we'll likely start rolling out 7.

With any luck, we'll be off netware by that point. I've been pushing for that for a couple years now, so it should happen this year.
 
Seeing as my company still uses NT4 for our retail hosts... XP Pro on most desktop systems.. and the CIO install 7 on his system and it fubar'd all the in-house apps n' such. Good luck :p
 
gonna be a long while before we go that route.
not sure if we've even received our volume licensing for it.

but regardless, we unfortunately have in-house apps that will most likely have compatibility issues with Win7. Yes, there is XP mode, but we still have a lot of old workstations without VT support, and the ones that do, don't have it enabled in the BIOS by default :rolleyes:

hell, we're still on IE6! :eek:
 
commodore said:
..and judging from MS's recent press release you will be till 2011 at least. I have spent hours writing IE6 specific code and i will spend many more it seems :rolleyes:
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press release what now?

well we are finally "testing" IE8. But unfortunately we have to deal with:
1. an old version of CSA (Cisco Security Agent) that does not play nice with any IE above 6.

2. compatibility issues with web-apps. Although I believe most of are web-apps have been upgraded. One in particular is now using InfoPath 2007 for creating documents, but is still accessed via IE for looking up the clients.
 
brom42 said:
You work for a school system, so you should have volume licensing. Beyond the man hours, there shouldn't be any cost.

I also work for a school system. I am rolling out Windows 7 this upcoming summer. It runs great on our cheap ass P4 desktops. However our faculty laptop lease is up this summer, so the laptops should run Win 7 awesomely.

The hard part is updating all of our VMs to Server 2008 over the duration of the school year without breaking anything.
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We do not do leases. We own all the assets and we do not resell any of them. Stupid tax dollars at work. Our school system is working on consolidating DNS servers and moving over to a new Active Directory structure. The problem like you said is the man hours.

I however could give 2 shits. I am working on getting Macs on the AD server.
 
I wish. At the data center I support there are still 486 DX2 66's running DOS and a few of them running Netware 3.12. (Yes, I'm quite serious.) :eek:
 
Currently starting our test phase with Windows 7 Enterprise and drawing up the scope of the deployment. Systems are all 3GB RAM with C2D but we already know we can't think about rolling it out yet as there's a single web app used that doesn't work in IE8. We have Firefox deployed as well but not everybody uses it due to preference.

XP Pro systems here currently only have IE7 installed. So during testing we need to make the push to get the web app updated to function with IE8 as it is a mission critical app. We could always map the program to IE7 via XP Mode but it's just simpler (and a better idea) to update the web app.
 
Everybody but our eng dept (we all run various flavors of Linux) all run windows. Maybe 2-3 Vista boxes and all the rest are XP. I don't see the IT staff moving people off XP any time soon.
 
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eventually. school system. we buy many of our assets, usually off-lease with warranties, with OS included. we only buy XP Pro PCs, though. we run a half dozen images that work on every PC in the district and it takes an entire summer just to tweak these few images to work 100% as intended, as then we still find major bugs throughout the school year (mostly due to being required to use both java 5 and 6). cant wait until we have to do it over 2 separate OSes as well...though we'd love to start rolling out Windows 7 it wouldnt be until next school year at the earliest.
 
We didn't approve Vista until this year, because of a lot of testing and compatibility issues, and in the end we approved it for in-place upgrades, only doing a forklift upgrade in one property. We expect that we'll have 7 approved by first of the year, mostly because the hard part was done in the Vista process. Since budgets aren't allowing for much in the way of hardware upgrades, it will be a slow turnover in 2010 - I'll be lucky to get 40% of my own properties' inventory switched over, only because I'm anxious to adopt it, many other places may not touch it until late '10 or early '11.

IMHO, I'm more concerned with Server 2k8 - there's a lot of things I like about Windows 7 that kinda require having a 2k8 server, but in this day and age it looks like 2k3 will be with us a long long long time.
 
Cax6ton said:
IMHO, I'm more concerned with Server 2k8 - there's a lot of things I like about Windows 7 that kinda require having a 2k8 server, but in this day and age it looks like 2k3 will be with us a long long long time.
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Same. I really want to be able to use AppLocker but it'll take an act of God to get permission to test 2008 R2 and migrate to it at this point. Also want to move to Exchange 2010 in the future but again...act of God required.
 
Vermillion said:
Currently starting our test phase with Windows 7 Enterprise and drawing up the scope of the deployment. Systems are all 3GB RAM with C2D but we already know we can't think about rolling it out yet as there's a single web app used that doesn't work in IE8. We have Firefox deployed as well but not everybody uses it due to preference.

XP Pro systems here currently only have IE7 installed. So during testing we need to make the push to get the web app updated to function with IE8 as it is a mission critical app. We could always map the program to IE7 via XP Mode but it's just simpler (and a better idea) to update the web app.
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Plus you can not manage policies in group policy. Working with policies is a bitch in Firefox.
 
Vermillion said:
Same. I really want to be able to use AppLocker but it'll take an act of God to get permission to test 2008 R2 and migrate to it at this point. Also want to move to Exchange 2010 in the future but again...act of God required.
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Is your company viritualized on VMWare? You could always test the waters that way if your servers are under utilized.
 
roaf85 said:
Plus you can not manage policies in group policy. Working with policies is a bitch in Firefox.
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Yep exactly. Not fun when users know about FF add-ons and screw shit up but we have to have multiple browsers here due to the business. A few machines even have Opera and Chrome on them but IE7 and FF are the most used. IE7 though definitely has the most use though by the normal user.
 
Vermillion said:
Yep exactly. Not fun when users know about FF add-ons and screw shit up but we have to have multiple browsers here due to the business. A few machines even have Opera and Chrome on them but IE7 and FF are the most used. IE7 though definitely has the most use though by the normal user.
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On the mac side Firefox is way worse. It stores preferences in a encrypted folder. It makes it impossible to manage.

Too bad the standard is to use Firefox and I have to then train or try to move people over to Camino and convince upper management to use Camino. It is not going well, but unless I have a plist management it is impossible to manage this.
 
I'd like to be rolling it out. We have a couple of inhouse apps that will stop it for a couple of users. At least Vista works for them.
 
I am evaluating it on 4 machines at my company. So far so good. I noticed it handles offline file syncing much better than Vista. Less performance hit for offline files by far. Any new machines will get Win7, and I'll probably move all Vista machines to 7. XP machines will remain so as they are mostly EOL anyhow.

My highest priority right now is the move from Server 03 to Server 08 R2.
 
I've ordered a new pc for myself which will be running W7 so I can give it a run, but we normally don't roll out something until the first service pack is released. I currently run Vista and the only one to do so. I intentionally kept any new purchases downgraded to XP. I know Win7 will be fine and have no problem eventually rolling that out.
 
One of my friends reloaded all of the workstations at the datacenter he works at with it already.

Anyway I've been running the RTM since it came out testing it myself. Been happy so far. Really at this point I'm waiting for the xp vm to be finalized so I can do the final testing on it.

We are looking at trying to avoid 32 bit installs of 7 where possible due to clients hitting the upper ends of what the 32 bit desktop versions of windows can address.
 
Vermillion said:
Yep exactly. Not fun when users know about FF add-ons and screw shit up but we have to have multiple browsers here due to the business. A few machines even have Opera and Chrome on them but IE7 and FF are the most used. IE7 though definitely has the most use though by the normal user.
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IE8 is amazingly better than 7, might consider upgrading. we're normally slow on upgrading core components due to security risks/bugs but we jumped right onto 8. it's twice as fast and has some better management features and the compatibility mode is great for poorly coded sites that some people require.
 
Dan_D said:
I wish. At the data center I support there are still 486 DX2 66's running DOS and a few of them running Netware 3.12. (Yes, I'm quite serious.) :eek:
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It took almost $50,000 to replace an ancient 486 box running a reactor last year when it finally died between the software rewrite and testing. Luckily enough someone had a box they could loan out from another old instrument while this happened because management never saw the need to update until it was too late (it always got pushed to the next fiscal years budget).
 
I work for a worldwide autoparts mfg and we still have some machines on our network using Windows for Workgroups 3.11... God help us all!
 
Somnambulator said:
IE8 is amazingly better than 7, might consider upgrading. we're normally slow on upgrading core components due to security risks/bugs but we jumped right onto 8. it's twice as fast and has some better management features and the compatibility mode is great for poorly coded sites that some people require.
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Yeah ours isn't really the website itself. It's the stupid add-on the page uses. It's not compatible with IE8 and the vendor isn't exactly in a rush to update it either. Stupid really. I'm betting it's a simple update.

Would love to get everybody on IE8 though. Especially with the new AppLocker and GPO in Server 2008 R2, IE8 can be amazingly secure. Far more secure then Firefox, Chrome or Opera. NoScript makes Firefox very secure but you try teaching NoScript to the Average Joe user who doesn't like it when it's not their name in the login box by default. ;)
 
Nope. :(

They are very cheap. so cheap that they want a highend P4 or better with 17in flat screen with keyboard and mouse for $150 tops. :rolleyes:
 
I will be early in 2010. At $15 a user....of course I will! Please note, that is a non-profit price. Thank you, TechSoup!
 
DeaconFrost said:
I will be early in 2010. At $15 a user....of course I will! Please note, that is a non-profit price. Thank you, TechSoup!
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Should just be paying the 10 bucks now for the vista license as it has software assurance which would allow you to get the newest release during the 2 year period that it is good for.
 
pcgeek11 said:
I work for a worldwide autoparts mfg and we still have some machines on our network using Windows for Workgroups 3.11... God help us all!
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Doesn't surprise me. I used to be an IT manager for a large parts distributer in the south, and the stuff they used was old. SCO UNIX on an old system with an Ultimate database, and a dot matrix printer that they had since 1983, and a bunch of dumb terminals probably just as old. If you want to work with the latest and greatest, the auto parts industry is the wrong place to be.
 
Windows 7 really has some great functionalities that schools would really benefit from.

In terms of stability, reliability and general impressions from early adopters of Windows 7, everyone agrees that WIndows 7 was a great improvement over both XP and Vista.

I'd take a quick glance at the Windows.com/Enterprise site as it has a ton of case studies to help you make an informed decision :)
Let me know if you have questions, I have a lot of resources for info.
Cheers,

Alex
 
Hey Alex, I don't think it's a question of features or anything lacking from xp ( anymore, that was vista's bane ). I think it's simply a question of cost. 7 came out at the worst possible economic time. My locations aren't pushing forward with 7 deployments until at least the 2010/11 budget years, and even then it's going to be on so limited a basis as to be practically non-existent. This isn't due to any perceived benefit of XP over 7, but rather because we can't afford new systems ( which is when we do OS upgrades ).
 
At my work we just moved to Windows XP two years ago after being on Windows 2000 for who knows how long...and knowing the morons that work higher up in the IT section who do the buying, they'll get Vista before we get 7...
 
We are currently planning the migration from xp to 7. Our biggest hurdle will be the printers. We have around 150ish local tcp/ip printers that are not centralized and while USMT4(hardlinks woo) will migrate printers, there will most likely be some printer driver issues that will require some cleaver coding to get around I am sure.

After that its will be the usual making of images, configuring USMT and SCCM. My guesstimate is that we wont actually have something solid until December, and then we will probably start with a few pilot groups around the holidays when work is slow. Though we will be imaging the locked down student labs with 7 as soon as SCCM SP2 hits (few weeks from now).
 
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big uni rollout to 7 next year, we're trialing it.

so far huge issues with server 2003 shares and software compatability (from xp, we never touched on vista ever)

everything else is fine.
 
issue with 2003 Shares? Our domain and half of our servers are 2003 yet we have no issues with shares. This in a non domain environment?
 
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