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Companies 'Blah' About Vista
PreacherTom writes "Those who expected the initial Vista release to generate a wave of hype will be sorely disappointed. While Vista is now available for companies, they do not really appear to care. The situation is the same with Office 2007. Why? Several reasons, not the least of which is expected difficulty in adaptation to the new features." From the article: "Office has an entirely new look and new formats for saving files in Word and Excel. Slick as it is, the new look will take some training to master. And the new file formats, which will be easier to use with high-end corporate programs such as those that run servers, mean users on older versions of Office will have to download a program to open documents and spreadsheets sent with the new technology. 'This thing is not going to be all that easy to roll out,' says Michael Silver, research vice-president at Gartner."
Better centralized management tools. Improved security model. Mostly, the changes affect infrastructure management as opposed to end-user experience. Oh, yeah, the big one: 64-bit support, which is not needed for typical office applications, but is an absolute must for companies moving their CAD workstations to Windows. CATIA V5, for example, fully supports the 64-bit Vista architecture right now.
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Though with Windows 2000 in extended support phase since June of this year, there are probably a number of larger corporations that skipped Windows XP and plan to go from 2000 to Vista.
Vista has a lot of Business features - in fact, they probably have more biz features than consumer features.
BitLocker is a nifty tech that encrypts the system volume, needing a USB key to boot. I wonder how many businesses with (stolen!) laptops would love to have this feature.
Windows MeetingSpace uses the new network implementation in Vista to allow peer-to-peer detection of clients. Meaning you bring your WiFi laptop into a conference room and you're logged into MeetingSpace. The program itself lets you collaborate - you can share an open program and work on it simultaneously, or share your entire desktop, or what have you not.
Speech Recognition is built into the OS and in my experience, actually works pretty well. I can see a lot of secretaries, typing-deficient people, bosses, etc. appreciating being able to dictate to a computer. I can also see some liability disappear as businesses "cure" carpal tunnel and other repetitive strain nonsense.
User Account Control makes it completely possible to run as a standard user or to default to standard user privileges only even when logged into an admin account.
Windows Service Hardening uses the same changes in the Vista kernel that allow IE7 "protected mode" and UAC to function to run each Windows service under its own user. This means that viruses and the like will be unable to mess with the file system, registry, etc. by piggybacking onto a Windows service, because the special user account the service runs under simply won't have those priviliges.
The new Windows Driver Model and Code Integrity make the system more secure and stable. Unsigned drivers are no longer allowed to run in kernel mode. Instead, the kernel exports a set of interfaces used to program most drivers in user mode, meaning:
There's a bunch of other stuff, too, like Windows PowerShell that system admins are going to love (although they're releasing this for Windows XP SP2, also).
There's a lot of business features, most of them focusing on security and stability. (Vista also plays a lot nicer with Unix than XP does.) The question isn't whether there's any "business argument", but whether these features are worth the upgrade. For some businesses, they will be; for others, they won't.
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