* Should you migrate your desktops to Windows Vista?
Should you be planning to migrate your desktops to Windows Vista (formerly Longhorn) with the intention to also upgrade to the yet-to-be-named Longhorn server product when that ships sometime this decade?
Don’t be afraid to admit that your answer is “I don’t know.” Trusted experts have come down on both sides of this question.
Recently, the Gartner Group issued a research note to its clients (reported by the U.K.’s TechWorld) suggesting that the dropping of the long awaited WinFS file system from Longhorn/Vista “…makes Longhorn look increasingly like a product intended to simply fill in a gap in the schedule.” According to the TechWorld article, the analyst firm told its clients: “Gartner believes that Microsoft wishes to release a new version of Windows by year-end 2006 to shore up revenue and appease customers that paid for Software Assurance on the client OS under Enterprise, Open or Select agreements.”
Not so fast, replies Burton Group senior vice president and research director Dan Blum (who also contributes frequently to Network World). In his Weblog Blum pulls no punches: “This is actually a gross Gartner oversimplification of the issues.” He goes on to list a couple of the new major features of Longhorn/Vista, including “Indigo,” the Windows Communication Foundation and “Avalon,” the Windows Presentation Foundation, both of which are essential to Microsoft’s vision of a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Blum does say that there’s no need to rush to migrate to Vista, though, as both Indigo and Avalon are being back-ported to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. In a similar vein, Gartner recommended that its clients standardize on Windows XP SP2 just in case a move to Vista becomes warranted.
I’m going to agree solidly with both Gartner and Blum, in a way. Indigo and Avalon are important. If you aren’t familiar with them, more info is available from Microsoft. For Indigo, Microsoft has a “Community Technology Preview” page, while “A Guided Tour of Windows Presentation Foundation” provides a good introduction to Avalon.
These two technologies should be integrated into your network as soon as possible, which means you should be running XP desktops and Windows Server 2003 servers. That should be the priority. You’ll want to acquire Vista when it ships (or download a customer preview should one become available) to run through its paces in your lab. But there’s no need to rush to install it network-wide and like all new releases of software, there are plenty of reasons to take a slow, deliberate approach to upgrading.
