Windows 7 Gets the Green Lite

After taking a pass on Vista, IT shops are ready to commit to Microsoft's new PC operating system.

Computerworld |

Jim Thomas said no to Windows Vista -- simply Windows 7 is an entirely different affair.

Thomas, director of IT operations at Pella Corp., says his IT team began beta-testing Vista's successor a year ago equally an upgrade path from Windows XP. By October, just 2 months after Windows vii launched, the Pella, Iowa-based window and door manufacturer had 225 Windows 7 clients upwardly and running -- and the feedback from both the Information technology staff and end users has been generally positive.

Pella is set up to motility forrad, Thomas says. "We will accept 50% of our users -- that'southward two,500 machines -- deployed on Windows seven in 2010," he says. By the end of next yr he expects to take ninety% of his users on the new operating organization.

This time, Information technology organizations say, it looks like Microsoft Corp. has delivered the goods. And just in time. Nigh eighty% of IT organizations didn't adopt Vista, according to enquiry firm Gartner Inc. Instead, the vast majority of enterprise users remain on Windows XP, an eight-and-a-half-yr-old operating system that should have passed into the high-tech fossil tape long ago.

Computerworld surveyed 285 Information technology professionals to gauge their attitudes and intentions regarding Windows vii. Overall, 72% of the respondents said they plan to drift to Windows 7, with 70% proverb that they will implement it within a year or that they already are installing it.

The No. one reason cited for upgrading: to get off of Windows XP. That said, almost 40% of the survey respondents reported that they will keep using XP until Microsoft stops supporting it -- in Apr 2014 -- before they install Windows 7 on all of their Windows machines.

However, those willing to wait that long are in the minority. "We're gear up to move on," says Paul Shane, It director at the Philadelphia office of Milliman Inc., an actuarial consulting firm based in Seattle. He avoided Vista, but he expects to have most of his 150 desktops and laptops on Windows 7 by the end of this year. Disappointed with Vista, Shane briefly considered moving to Macs and the Bone X operating system. Merely now, he says, "nosotros've bandage those aside."

Thomas and Shane both say they aren't even going to wait for the first service pack, which Gartner analyst Michael Silver says customers can expect sometime this summer.

What IT Wants

For IT, Windows 7 is an opportunity to take advantage of new features and better integration. Windows Server and Microsoft'southward Organisation Centre Configuration Manager, in particular, can save money by requiring fewer pieces of management software and tin make managing desktops easier.

Art Sebastiano, vice president of infrastructure at ModusLink Global Solutions Inc. in Waltham, Mass., has been testing Windows vii on a few dozen machines for a rollout on iii,500 PCs in thirty locations effectually the world. He says Windows Server's account credential (password) caching capability, which facilitates single sign-on and allows access to networked resources when a domain controller is unavailable, works amend with Windows seven clients.

"Driver support and legacy compatibility have been expert," Sebastiano says, adding that Microsoft offers a downloadable XP Way program to facilitate backward compatibility.

Shane says group policy controls are improved in Windows 7. "We really love the new client group policy. You tin can manage a lot of things through group policy now that used to require a log-in script," he says.

At University HealthSystem Consortium in Oakbrook, Ill., a new Windows 7 feature called DirectAccess, which allows secure remote access without a split up VPN client and log-in, is a big win. Donald Naglich, director of applied science infrastructure, says that for the half of his 275 users who use laptops, remote admission volition become more seamless. "It's one of the chief reasons we want to [move to] Windows 7," he says. "It'due south one less piece of software we take to worry most from an integration standpoint." He plans to start migrating to Windows 7 early on next year and hopes to have all systems upgraded by the end of 2011.

Pella is considering deploying DirectAccess for the same reasons. "Users don't like having to remember to launch a VPN client and log in," Thomas says.

Both Pella and Milliman see BitLocker, a Windows vii feature that provides full volume encryption, as a solid win for laptop users. "We used a tertiary-party product that didn't integrate well with Windows and had a split up password," says Shane. "Now we can secure laptops, and the encryption and security is transparent to the user."

The User Interface

IT executives say Windows vii boots upwardly faster than Vista, is more stable and removes the intrusive user access control pop-ups. Merely most end users didn't have Vista, so they tend to compare the Windows 7 user interface to Windows XP's.

ModusLink's Sebastiano says that on the whole, his users like the interface, specially features like drag-and-drop "snap" resizing of windows for easy side-by-side comparisons, and taskbar previews.

Merely Shane says his users are carve up on the new taskbar -- "People either dear it or hate information technology." It's a challenge, he says, considering he has users who can't navigate the Get-go menu in Windows XP to find programs. "If it'south not a shortcut on the desktop, they're in trouble," he notes. He fears that another change to the taskbar may only add together to user defoliation.

Users besides don't always sympathise Windows vii libraries, a setup that replaces the standard binder metaphor with a more than sophisticated model that allows groupings of files that may be stored in different locations. What's more, File Explorer defaults to the local library -- even if y'all don't want users pointed there. Shane says that even administrators may detect it annoying at first. "When yous're rolling out a agglomeration of PCs on a network, it gets in the fashion," he says.

Shane says his users like Windows 7'due south interface improvements, such as those Sebastiano described, and more subtle changes, such as the way Windows automatically makes desktop icons bigger on larger screens with higher resolution. "That has helped users with poor eyesight," he says.

Users particularly like what he calls the "shake and bake" feature on the Aero desktop that lets the user minimize all open up windows on-screen except for the currently selected one past simply grabbing and shaking that window from side to side.

Such features have been well received, "but users have to be told well-nigh them," he says.

Thomas warns that a migration from XP to Windows 7 will require some training. "Users oasis't ever gotten value from the tools nosotros shove their manner," he says. "This time we're spending more time upfront trying to understand where the values are and really promoting that."

Remaining Challenges

Given a choice between bringing in Windows seven on new machines and upgrading old ones, near organizations adopt the former. Most (58%) of the survey respondents, even so, said they will likewise upgrade at least some existing machines.

One mode to avoid replacing PCs is to use virtualization technologies. Naglich plans to do exactly that at University HealthSystem Consortium. And he's not solitary in considering the use of desktop virtualization to ease the transition to Windows vii. Nearly i in five (xviii%) of It professionals surveyed said they plan to move at to the lowest degree some Windows XP users from traditional Windows PCs to hosted virtual desktops as they migrate to Windows seven.

For existing hardware that meets Windows seven system requirements, the usual upgrade bug apply. "Fresh installs are quick," Sebastiano says. On the other hand, while a Vista upgrade to Windows seven is adequately straightforward, getting user profiles and settings moved over from XP is more challenging. He's looking at using Laplink Software Inc.'southward PCmover to handle that.

Application compatibility is another potential challenge, particularly for older software. That'southward something Axium Healthcare Chemist's Inc. may have to deal with. The online specialty pharmacy uses several internally developed Visual Basic six applications that won't run on Windows 7, non even with the XP Mode software. "A lot of ActiveX controls don't play at all," says Norbert Cointepoix, manager of IT at Lake Mary, Fla.-based Axium.

But Matt Okuma has establish that some applications run better. Okuma, enterprise builder at Best Technology Services, a business unit of Pacific Coast Edifice Products Inc. in Rancho Cordova, Calif., says his Cisco Unified Communications software never worked properly on nigh 100 of the Vista machines he rolled out. Some of those, he says, had to exist rolled back to Windows XP. With Windows 7, however, it runs just fine. "We dear information technology. Everything just works," he says.

"The biggest issue is making sure y'all do application compatibility testing," Pella'due south Thomas says. Pella'due south IT staff has had to update software releases and work through issues on some of the company's approximately 400 applications. Pella is still doing compatibility testing; information technology started with the applications used by the greatest number of employees. "Our issue has been on older apps that didn't necessarily follow current development guidelines," Thomas says, explaining that the visitor had to make "modest adjustments" on approximately twenty% of its applications, or become updates if newer releases were bachelor.

In general, he says, "we haven't had also many applications that we haven't been able to get running."

Overall, after living with XP for more than 8 years, It leaders at most organizations say they finally feel comfortable moving on. Shane says he expects the transition at Milliman to become smoothly. "It'southward non something completely new," he says. "They just made a ameliorate Vista."

Robert Fifty. Mitchell writes on a wide range of topics, including analytics, emerging technologies, green It and data centers.

Copyright © 2010 IDG Communications, Inc.