Vista presents one of myriad decisions IT customers face

For first time since Windows 95, Office, Exchange upgrades on table at same time

By John Fontana , Network World , 11/30/2006

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The hard part is over: Microsoft officially rolled out its Vista client operating system today, now it must convince users, who have more desktop options now with Linux and Apple OS X, that the operating system is the way to go.

And Vista, which has been in development for five years, isn’t the only decision on the table for corporate IT as Microsoft also shipped Office 2007 and announced a faux-launch of Exchange 2007, which is slated to be generally available in early December.

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Taken together, those three not only provide options and challenges for IT on their own, but together offer a formidable trio of major software upgrade decisions that will require careful consideration. It is the first time in 11 years that Microsoft’s flagship products, which still generate more than 90% of the company’s revenue, have been shipped simultaneously going back to Windows 95 and Office 95.

Back then, the Rolling Stones’s Mick Jagger sang the band’s “Start Me Up” to kick off Windows 95, but the fanfare for Vista's release to volume licensing customers appears to be coming down to just another business decision.

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Long road to Vista
Microsoft last week released Vista, which has been in development for the past five years and is the first operating system to ship from Microsoft since Windows XP in December 2001.

May 2001: Work on Vista, then code-named Longhorn, begins with expected ship date in 2003.

DJune 2001: Jim Allchin, now co-president of the server and platform group at Microsoft, announces next release of Windows code-named Longhorn and says it will ship in late 2002 or early 2003. The date is later changed to April 2004 then appended numerous times afterward.

Oct. 2003: Microsoft says Vista release date is 2005 or 2006.

Aug. 2004: Development of Longhorn/Vista is halted as the project is Òreset,Ó shifting the code base from Windows XP to the one used for Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1. Release date now set as second half of 2006. Major feature, Win FS, pulled from operating system.

July 2005: Beta 1 released and name changed to Vista.

Sept. 2005 Ñ Feb. 2006: Community Technology Previews released (September, October, December, February).

May 2006: Beta 2 released to testers. Made publicly available on June 6, 2006. Microsoft announces year-end shipment to volume licensing customers and January 2007 delivery to consumers.

June 2006: WinFS file system officially out of Vista.

Nov. 30, 2006: Vista ships, along with Office 2007, the first joint launch since Windows 5 and Office 95. Exchange 2007 also formally launched.

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And users are contemplating if they may want to make the upgrades, and more important, why and when.

“What are we doing about Vista?” asks Jim Tieri, director of IT for Holland Co. a Crete, Ill., manufacturer of railway welding and maintenance equipment, “In one word. Apple.”

Tieri, who has 300 desktops used mostly by remote workers, says his department has been evaluating Vista and its benefits and they think it looks a lot like Apple’s OS X. “We have bought our first group of Macs and we are seeing how we can integrate them into the environment, and see if we can use them from a business standpoint.” He says the major application to support is ERP and that can be run through a browser interface. As far as the Office release, Tieri says he’s already running some copies of Open Office that are showing some real possibilities. “For us there are no features benefits in Office 2007.”