March 09, 2010, 3:42 PM — Jim Thomas said no to Windows Vista -- but Windows 7 is an entirely different matter.
Thomas, CIO at Pella Corp., says his IT team began beta testing Vista's successor a year ago as an upgrade path from Windows XP. By October, just two months after Windows 7 launched, the Pella, Iowa-based window and door manufacturer had 225 Windows 7 clients up and running -- and the feedback from both IT staff and end users has been generally positive.
Pella is ready to move forward, Thomas says. "We will have 50% of our users, that's 2,500 machines, deployed on Windows 7 in 2010," he says. By the end of next year he expects to have 90% of the business on the new operating system.
This time, IT organizations say, it looks like Microsoft has finally delivered the goods. And just in time. About 80% of IT organizations didn't move forward with Vista, according to Gartner Inc. Instead, the vast majority of enterprise users remain on Windows XP, an outdated, eight-and-a-half-year-old operating system that should have passed into the high tech-fossil record long ago.
Computerworld surveyed 285 IT professionals to gauge their attitudes and intentions with regard to Windows 7. Overall, 72% said they plan to migrate to Windows 7, with 70% saying they will implement it within a year or that they already are installing the new OS.
The number one reason cited for upgrading: To get off the aging Windows XP platform. That said, however, almost 40% of survey respondents will take XP support to the end -- April 2014 -- before they install Windows 7 on all their Windows machines.
Which version of Windows is currently running in your IT operation?
[Check all that apply]
Windows XP - 93%
Windows Vista - 35%
Windows 2000 - 15%
Windows 98 - 3%
Windows 95 - 2%
Source: Computerworld online survey; 205 respondents
Those willing to wait that long, however, are in the minority. "We're ready to move on," says Paul Shane, IT director at the Seattle offices of Milliman, Inc., an actuarial consulting firm in Seattle. He avoided Vista, which he says was initially problematic, clumsy, buggy and continues to suffer from slow performance. But he expects to have most of his 150 desktops and laptops upgraded to Windows 7 by the end of this year. Disappointed with Vista, Shane briefly considered the Mac and OS X platforms. Now, he says, "We've cast those aside."
Like Thomas, he's not even waiting for the first Service Pack, which Gartner analyst Michael Silver says customers can expect some time this summer. (Microsoft had no comment on the availability of SP1.)
What IT wants: Enterprise features
For IT, Windows 7 is an opportunity to take advantage of new features and better integration, especially with Windows Server and Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager, which can save money by requiring fewer pieces of management software, and can make managing desktops easier.
Art Sebastiano, vice president of infrastructure at ModusLink Global Solutions in Waltham, Mass., has been testing Windows 7 on a few dozen machines for a rollout on 3,500 machines in 30 global locations. He says Windows Server's account-credential (password) caching, which facilitates single sign-on and allows access to networked resources when a domain controller is unavailable, works better with Windows 7 clients. "Driver support and legacy compatibility has been good," he says, and adds that Microsoft offers a downloadable XP Mode program to facilitate backward compatibility.
For his part, Shane says group policy controls are improved under Windows 7. "We really love the new client group policy. You can manage a lot of things through group policy now that used to require a login script," he says.
