What is your IT department doing about

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piako

[H]ard|Gawd
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planning for Vista adoption? Curious to ask b/c it seems this article and this article both say corporate IT adoption is slow. Do you really think that some shops will skip vista all-together and wait for the next os?
 
Personally, i think it depends on what the office is doing, and if there machines have the power to run vista. For most business use, i would imagine them staying with XP at least until they retire their current PCs and are forced to upgrade.
 
All of my customers (Small Businesses) are kinda in the same boat. If we order a new machine, it has Vista. Everything old stays as it is. I am actually still ordering XP for a few customers due to some old software they use.
 
I've only deployed Vista at 1x client of mine...a law firm. Brand new hardware. Even on current hardware, Core 2 Duos, adequate RAM, complaints of slowness.

Other obstacles....

***Vista clients often cannot easily install printer shares from the server (2K3)...as some printers have drivers specifically for Vista, which cannot install on 2K3 server. 2K3/XP drivers that the server uses will error out if you try to install to workstations via the server share. And from I've read, Microsoft does not plan on adding Vista drive support to 2K3 server like they did in the past with older OS's...where on the server you can manually install drivers for other OS's on the servers print share. :rolleyes: Also check any other networked hardware, networked scanners, fax machines, other big MFP units, timeclocks, etc.

***Many applications require the latest program version to be able to be run on Vista. So here is some added "cost" to factor in. Such as this law firm client of mine....they always keep up to date with their primary LOB, "Needles"..so that was fine. But other software, such as their Trial software called "Sanctions"...needed the latest version. Plus their accounting department needed the latest version of Timeslips, as well as the latest version of Sage/Peachtree Accounting...more costs.

A rule of thumb for me....always keep your network running platforms which are supported by your line of business software. Make sure they will support their product on Vista. As time goes on...this won't be such a problem, as they don't have a choice. But last year, not many were as of yet.
 
It looks like we'll be skipping it. Upgrading 7000 machines is a pretty tall order and I don't think the bosses want to support a mixed environment. There are some lingering compatibility issues with home brew software that is mission critical. There's also concern about lost productivity while users adjust to the new OS. I've got a few of mine that can barely function on XP as it is...

I think for us, the decision has been delayed so long, we may just wait until the next OS.
 
We're testing it right now but I doubt we will be switching any time soon. Even on our new machines that come with Vista, we re-image with XP.
 
I work at a university. Our campus was an early beta tester of Vista, and documented different bugs with Cisco routers, etc. Adoption by units has varied wildly. All student computing clusters have Vista loaded. Our departmental pcs, though, will not be migrating to Vista. We're upgrading all faculty/staff pcs this year, and the decision was made to continue XP instead of Vista. It is likely we'll adopt the next iteration of Microsoft OS, assuming it's released in 3 years.

Edit: The department is large, and our IT guys have about 300 pcs they have to worry about.

--ceolstan
 
We won't be switching (small airline with around 500 computers). Just no compelling reason to upgrade.
 
I built an image of it at work in June of 07. We imaged about 15 or so PC's by the end of 07. We now only have 3 left. The others went back to XP. Why? Because there is such negative pressure here to use anything other than the standard XP.

We had a high level executive state we weren't going to go to Vista in 08. And based on how we are doing NOTHING I don't forsee it going anywhere in 09 as well.

I'm using it here at work, and I don't have a single problem using it. But if we even wanted to roll it out where I work we would have to upgrade 90% of the 4500 or so computers we have. And the 10% that can run it CPU wise, would need a serious RAM bump from 2x256MB...
 
Most of our desktops still have to support an old DOS accounting application called Real World.... No Vista for us 'til my boss convinces the woman in charge of that to switch.
 
We won't be switching any time soon (100 users). There's no compelling reason for us. We will eventually, but there's no impetus. We have software assurance on everything, so we could if we wanted.
 
In the process of upgrading right now. They are also buying Lenovo X300's/T61's and quad core Lenovo desktops with 4GB of RAM, so slowness isn't as much of a problem.
 
MorfiusX said:
All of my customers (Small Businesses) are kinda in the same boat. If we order a new machine, it has Vista. Everything old stays as it is. I am actually still ordering XP for a few customers due to some old software they use.
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Since vista came out I've been ordering every machine with vista business(few with ultimate) and just reimaging them to xp pro. Gotta love downgrade rights. This way they are ready for vista if they need to be reloaded in the future.

I have a few clients that have started to switch over and 2 clients that are fully vista houses. We deal with a bunch of accountants who can't switch as they need too many back versions of quickbooks to support their clients that don't run on it. Others have some custom apps that don't support it either.

One of are lawfirms is at like 50% for vista. Pretty much every new machine has been deployed with it and a few have vista licenses on them ready for it if we reload them. Right now we just don't see the point of upgrading it when it is working fine. They were one of the early ones to start switching over. We had issues with their konica copier which we had to throw a postscript card in to get it to work. Other then that we upgraded time matters and phoneslips to support it. We also have switch the office over to wordperfect 13 from 12 on every machine. This wasn't that big of a deal as wordperfect can be had for 20 bucks a system.

Wordperfect does suck ass though. Right now it has had this bug where it will crash if outlook 07 is open with it in vista. It has had it since they got it working with vista and unless something has changed in the last 2 months they refused to admit to it being an issue. I would think it is their problem because if it wasn't you would think they would blame ms for it. In our case the office is running outlook 03 since the exchange std comes with a cal for each user.
 
all my business i supply computers to get Vista with XP Pro Downgrade. extra 90 bucks from dell well worth it, if they want to upgrade in the future they can.

dell rep says 95% of his sales are still XP Pro.

vista is fine for home users, but bringing it into a mixed network is gonna give you a few problems.
 
We already upgraded to office 2007, we dont feel the need to move on to vista, everything we use for business works, what more do you need ? See through windows and green logon screens ? NO!

We want to save the money and currently we are spending on more useful things like a brand new intranet system and energy saving thin clients and windows 2008 terminal servers to replace hungry desktops.

Fair play , Vista is a great OS but for work environments there is nothing special about the upgrade, and it does need a fair bit more resources that Windows XP! I think its a better idea to just skip vista and wait for the next version of windows. And yes, vista and xp on the same network, doesnt usually work out very well! If you want to upgrade make sure you upgrade evrything.
 
One of the big advantages I've seen are with the trouble users who always end up getting their systems infected with adware. Vista has seemed to really help stop this. What sucks is we had to turn off uac on some networks because of issues with timematters as I know a few lawyers this would help.
 
Office 2007 has been coming with our new PCs which I find unfortunate. I have it and I can use it, but the UI is MUCH worse, ESPECIALLY for Access, and the users downstairs (general office staff) have a very hard time figuring it out. Bleh. Thumbs down, MS!

Certainly no need to upgrade though
 
Running all ~20 computers here in the office with Vista Business, Office 2007 and the Office 07 backend up Sharepoint, Forms etc.

I've had zero issues from the office staff, much better malware prevention, I cant wait to get SBS08 rolled out!

Granted this was a complete network overhaul, but its all good.
 
dandragonrage said:
Office 2007 has been coming with our new PCs which I find unfortunate. I have it and I can use it, but the UI is MUCH worse, ESPECIALLY for Access, and the users downstairs (general office staff) have a very hard time figuring it out. Bleh. Thumbs down, MS!

Certainly no need to upgrade though
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Get an open license for office and downgrade to 03 then. Thats what we did for an office a few months ago.

Anyway everyone I know that is moving to office that didn't have much experience with it really likes the UI. Almost everyone that had been using it has trouble finding anything any more. Personaly I think it is a step in the right direction.

d3c1us said:
Running all ~20 computers here in the office with Vista Business, Office 2007 and the Office 07 backend up Sharepoint, Forms etc.

I've had zero issues from the office staff, much better malware prevention, I cant wait to get SBS08 rolled out!

Granted this was a complete network overhaul, but its all good.
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Yea I have sbs08 running my home network right now(the beta copy) and I'm liking it. Have a few clients we will be looking at taking to sbs08 next year as they come up for upgrades to their stuff.

Also yes sharepoint with office is a great combo.
 
We have a LOT of 'homebrew' programming going on, and unfortunately, we've found that most of our programs are not compatible.

So we're trying hard to not go to it. It offers nothing good to us. The only worry is Microsoft forcing it.
 
1300 user company. We've been testing it for months but still can't jump to it. Too many problems and incompatibilities with software, wireless, VPN clients, applications, etc. A couple developers use it, but that's about it. We will skip Vista altogether company wide.
 
To prevent potential headaches and ensure program compatibility, we're going to stick with XP for as long as we can.
 
Our CRM software build does not support IE7, so we cannot use vista at this time. We're going to do a build upgrade in the near future that will fix this... after that, new machines and freshly imaged machines will more than likely have Vista on it. No rush to switch though.
 
This wont be happening anytime soon at my lawfirm, we just moved to XP last year.
 
My boss stockpiled as many XP licenses as he possibly could. We're still running workstations with 2000 on them. My machine is the only Vista machine in the entire company.
 
Another Sys Admin here for my company. We're skipping VISTA. approx 85% of the programs we use do not work w/ vista. So to say the least not going to happen. We have approx 100 office and around 100 drivers. VPN software doesn't work, in house apps don't work w/ it, we're still using office 2000 ^-^ Doesn't work for crap on vista.

The only application I seriously see vista good for is home use for people that don't need the legacy support etc.

We also stocked up on xp machines. If we need anymore I'll be building them and buying the disks from a mom pop shop that gets the licenses from M$ :p

EDIT:
I should reword the above.. Some of office 2000 works. Addons that we have for office 2000 do not though. We're not even running exchange here. We have a 3rd party app that runs w/ outlook 2000 to update contacts, calendars etc...

Although we're having issues using excel with vista.. It just crashes when you try to execute the program.
 
Dillirium said:
we're still using office 2000 ^-^ Doesn't work for crap on vista.
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I use office 2000 on my vista machine all day every day with absolutely no problems at all.

What kind of issues are you having with it?
 
My employer is in the middle of a company wide Vista migration, as well as a server upgrade (not sure on the OS / hardware, but we are a strictly MS house).

We have approximately 3000 PCs and I think 1000 laptops. It took probably 6 months worth of software testing to make sure compatibility problems were taken care of. Now they have a team of sys admins that come to an office, or a section of an office, take a conference room for an entire week, and roll out new machines group by group.

Our old hardware ran XP Pro, but was pretty ancient. We're now all getting brand new HP workstations / laptops, and ALL the hardware is identical. There is only a few odd cases (3 or 4 in a 5000 person company) that require something different.

What's funny is we're doing this huge technical roll out, and we're a wine manufacturer. I find it funny.
 
We are staying with XP / Office 2003.

Vista is too much of a hurdle for users to get used to, and honestly, MS changed too much of the administration back-end at once to do a roll out. We have a few laptops that are running vista now (one of which is mine to get familiar).

We're sticking with office 2003 as well for now, but we're having our users get used to office 2007 in our training setup.
 
swatbat - you really like SBS 08? I have it on a server im messing with here in the office, i like hte setup of SBS03 better. now i gotta learn exchange 07 and such =/
 
For us, it's a question of training. Too many things in Vista are new; our users are just getting used to XP's interface.

Same with office 07.

We're on XP and 2003 for the foreseeable future.
 
i switched one of my small customers over to Vista, only because the owner wanted it, even though I suggested against it.
was only 5 machines and 1 laptop, I was proactive and just put new HDD's into the machines and saved the old ones (bought the HDD's with my own funds, but the owner payed for Vista OS and my time of course)
- charged them to upgrade the machines to Vista and install there apps
- charged them the same amount of time 3 weeks later to put them back to XP, which was done in an hour or so cause I had the HDD's saved.

At my day job, they are planning Vista/office2007 by the end of the year, they gave us new machines to get used to Vista on (HP DC7800), I promptly used it for all of 2 weeks, then unplugged it and stuck it against my cubicle wall.
Horrible performance for a dual core machine with 3gb mem, my T61 with XP works much faster and only has a 5400rpm drive.
 
i have a strict rule, you want vista, you support your self lol. good thing dell will still give us xp
 
We order our dells with vista license but xp pro is installed. We have no plans to upgrade and will wait to see what the next os brings to the table.
 
The member of the Windows team that was evaluating Vista... just installed Linux on his workstation.

I don't expect to see Vista on the desktop at work any time soon.
 
I don't work in IT, but my desktop at work has a Vista Business OEM license sticker and has XP loaded.
 
We have about 300 users in 3 offices. We have zero plans for Vista as of now. We will most likely skip it all together.
 
vage said:
My boss stockpiled as many XP licenses as he possibly could. We're still running workstations with 2000 on them. My machine is the only Vista machine in the entire company.
Click to expand...

Dillirium said:
We also stocked up on xp machines. If we need anymore I'll be building them and buying the disks from a mom pop shop that gets the licenses from M$ :p
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I have to ask both of you why? Get a windows open volume license and just downgrade vista business to it. You have to buy 5 licenses to get open or volume license agreements. Last time I did it for one company we support we ordered 4 copies of streets and trips 08 and one license for vista enterprise. The vista enterprise came with a volume license serial for windows xp pro and xp pro 64 and you can download the iso's off MS's site. After that all you need is an xp pro or vista business/ultimate coa on the machine and you can sub the volume license disk and serial for it. They made this change a few years ago with the xp voulme license. That way you have a true volume license for xp which also means no dealing with activations and you don't need to worry about digging up xp licenses. This also means if you want to go to vista in the future the machine is stickered for it. This is really the best way to do it.

marley1 said:
swatbat - you really like SBS 08? I have it on a server im messing with here in the office, i like hte setup of SBS03 better. now i gotta learn exchange 07 and such =/
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I already had to learn exchange 07(which rocks) and server 08 so for me it was nothing. We had a client we pushed to 08 server std back in april. We quoted out a server with it and exchange 07 to give them an idea of what to look forward to saying they really needed to look at doing it in the next 6 months or as they were really starting to have issues with the old whitebox that they had bought before we supported them. We had already verifed their stuff would run on it without issue. They came back like 2 weeks after the quote and said lets do it now. We have a non-profit open license with them which was nice because we got server and exchange for like 400 bucks with the user cals needed(they don't qualify for techsoup as they are religious so it cost a little more) and if we had issues with 08 we could always downgrade them to 03 as the open licenses come with 03, 03r2, and 03r2 64 bit keys. This was my first full exchange 07 install other then a test box but for the most part it went very smooth. The only big issue I had at the time was the fact that 08 server really wasn't out yet. You could only get it in open, select, or volume licenses and the av software really wasn't ready. We were going to install kaspersky on it but the exchange module wouldn't run on it and they had no idea why. GFI and symantec's mail av also would not run. Eset's av on the other hand worked without issue and because of their non-profit pricing it ended up being like 100 bucks or so cheaper then the kaspersky.

I will say I don't like how sbs08 takes even more options away from you as far as setting it up. With sbs03 you could not install some features or install them to a different partition. SBS08's beta at least doesn't really give you a choice. This isn't a big deal as it is easy to move shares and the exchange database. I will say the nice thing is it pretty much configures exchange for you which is very nice. Even with exchange sp1(which is required for 08) it takes some work to install on a 08 std box. It also takes more to setup then the old exchange did because it doesn't have a default way to route mail(you have to make a send connector) and is moduler. In the past you installed exchange then configured it. With 07 Std you install the parts you need then still have to configure it but now you have to configure even more. SBS pretty much handles it all for you. Also with exchange 07 you no longer can really do all of the users admin work from active directory. Anything exchange has to be done through exchanges console although you can modify ad users through it you still have to hit the ad console to mess with some of the features. SBS's console ties them back together better then the std does.

I don't like how MS is doing multiple cals for sbs or how it looks like it will cost a lot more. I also am not a fan of them dropping isa as with a 64bit server it might have seen some use. I also don't like how the backup program will not longer work with a tape drive although we generaly use backup exec on are clients over the sbs backup where possible. One huge positive is that it at least comes with a trail for some av software. It at least gets some people looking at a manged av since the onecare supports managed versions via it as I've seen people really skimp on this before.


FYI sorry if this runs on too much. I've been up over 35 hours and am very tired at this point.
 
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