Mitch Tulloch's Blog

XP/Vista Coexistence: Accessing Your Corporate Intranet

Some businesses go "all in" when they do their client computer refresh. Others don't have the money and perform their migration in stages. A good example is moving your users from XP to Vista. One of the benefits of Vista is BitLocker Drive Encryption, but this benefit is really only compelling for users who have laptops. So why not buy Vista-capable laptops for them while leaving all your desktop computers running XP? Are there any issues associated with doing that?

Actually there are a number of issues concerning getting Vista and XP to coexist together in the same environment. One of them is being able to access your corporate intranet site. Vista includes Internet Explorer 7 which has a new security architecture that can make it difficult to access some intranet sites. For more information on these new features see the whitepaper Technology Overview: Internet Explorer 7 for the Enterprise available from the Microsoft Download Center and see the Internet Explorer TechCenter on Microsoft TechNet for additional information.

What does this mean in terms of Vista/XP coexisting together? It means that before you start dropping Vista laptops into your network you should test to see whether users running IE7 will be able to access your intranet site. If they can't, you'll need to upgrade or re-code your intranet so that it supports IE7. Then once you've done that, install IE7 on your XP machines by downloading the update from here. Once you've done all this, then and only then you're ready to begin rolling out Vista to those uses who can benefit from the new platform.

Got comments concerning this tip? Want to share a tip of your own with ITWorld readers? Email me

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world