The vista for Vista
06 November 2006

We examine Windows Vista, Microsoft’s much-vaunted and long-awaited new operating system.

Microsoft’s much-vaunted, long-awaited and often-talked-about release of its new operating system was scheduled for August 2006 but consumers will now have to wait until January 2007. Businesses, however, can join the bandwagon from November. We preview Microsoft’s latest offering.

Microsoft has spent years developing Vista to be the ultimate PC operating system. So much so that many observers believe Vista will be Microsoft’s last big operating system launch. When it ships, it will come in five different ‘flavours’, allowing users to match the operating system level to their hardware – and upgrade when they upgrade their PC.

Meeting objectives

There are four major objectives of Vista – to improve security, deployment, manageability and performance. A new feature called Windows Service Hardening, for example, constantly monitors for abnormal activity in the file system and registry, There is also full-volume disk encryption, support for Trusted Platform Module security chips, and an upgraded firewall to filter outgoing as well as incoming traffic. Vista will additionally ship with Internet Explorer 7 which has new features to guard against spoofing and phishing attacks.

One aspect of particular interest to organisations with a mixed environment of legacy and newer hardware is the ability to run the different versions of Vista on PCs on the same network. So older, slower hardware can run the basic, less resource-intensive version, while new hardware can run the high performance version.

Giving support

Microsoft is also ensuring that tools to support Vista will be available immediately. People trained to help businesses move to the Windows update and a kit to test the compatibility of applications should make it easier and cheaper for organisations to install and manage Vista PCs. As Brad Goldberg, general manager for Windows product management, says: “Vista has business customers at the centre of everything we’ve done. In some cases, it will be cheaper for an organisation to upgrade to Vista than to keep their current configuration.”

All of which is prompting Microsoft to predict that Windows Vista will be adopted by companies at twice the speed of Windows XP.

IDC is more cautious and expects 11% of business Windows PCs to be running Vista by the end of 2007. As IDC analyst, Al Gillen, points out: “They have done all the right things but adoption is going to be driven by corporate adoption and deployment cycles, more so than by whether Microsoft has greased the skids to make the product glide in faster.”

This is the key to the adoption of Vista by the business world. With ever-tighter IT budgets, most organisations will be happy to stay with XP and take up the new operating system as a natural part of their ongoing upgrade cycle.

Kelway is a Microsoft Gold-certified partner. As well as selling the full range of Microsoft applications, we build complete solutions around Windows Server and Exchange Server. Our licensing teams also make it easy to understand Microsoft's Enterprise Select and OLP licensing programs.

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