Is Windows 7 Ready for Enterprise Use?

Let's see: The title is "Is Windows 7 Ready for Enterprise Use" and presenters include you and Mary Jo Foley. My guess is that your answer will be a critical "not quite." Is that right?

meh, I'd treat this webinar like I do all Paul's junk, skip to the end to read that Win7 is the best thing since the first moon landing. I like how he phrases it as a question "Is Win7 Ready for Enterprise?". You know his answer already.

Probably not yet. For individuals in corporations, maybe. But for entire corporate roll-outs? I wouldn't count on it. Not quite yet.

Seem to me the proper topic wouldn't be "Is Windows 7 Ready for Enterprise Use?" (of course it is) but rather "Is Enterprise Ready for Windows 7?" Different question, but much more to the point.

Hope the presentation won't be as cringe-inducing as Microsoft's video on how to host your own Windows 7 launch party. MS just doesn't understand cool. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ

I've been using Windows 7 for several months now. Meh. it's ok. Definitely not worth the upgrade price. It still has a problem seeing servers in our domain. The new task bar was aped from OS X.

If you read the description the answer is more likely: Yes, but.... Paul will wax on and on about all the new bitchen' features, he will then caution the usual, but you should do your due diligence and test the snot out of it, less a mission critical App takes a dump. Regards Joe

Hmmm. Let's see now. RunTimeError is saying that an operating system that only sells a quarter of a billion copies is a "horrorshow". Keep that bar in mind for RTE's discussions of successful and failing personal computer products in the future. Remember folks, you heard it directly from RTE, anything in the personal computer world with less than 250,000,000 copies sold in 3 years is a horrorshow.

tayme The actual perception with actual customers must not be so bad to sell a quarter of a billion copies. You probably need to get out more and stop thinking that only talking with people who agree with you is a valid cross section of the world. It tends to lead to these self-reinforcing perception problems you and RTE seem to suffer from.

@ chuckb84 >They also don't care about Paul's opinion. But you do apparently.

rr0de Actually, those aren't sales figures they're installed base numbers. I don't know the sales figures but they're certainly higher. I've found that in the IT world there are some admins who work very hard to say "Yes" to upgrades and spend their time testing and finding solutions to compatibility and training problems. Their corporations are either on Vista or on 7 by now. There are others who work equally hard to find reasons to say "No". They seem to spend their time writing up why they can't do anything about the problems rather than finding solutions. They're the ones who haven't installed an upgrade since XP SP2 and spend their time online complaining about how hard their job is and how unfair it is that they're expected to keep learning new stuff.

@mikegalos I work with a rather large amount of companies on a daily (and, more often than not, nightly) basis. Out of that amount only ONE I know of runs Vista on all of their machines. One. A handful have Vista installed on a few workstations. The rest run XP. Paul himself said is in this very post: "with most running on a creaky, Windows XP-based infrastructure". The keyword there is *most*. So while MS may have sold a billion copies of Vista, you can pretty much guarantee that in *most* corporate offices, those copies are sitting on the shelf gathering dust. Sales don't add up to actual usage. So if the sleepless IT Admins of the world haven't rushed to upgrade their companies to Vista in the past three years, what makes anyone think that they're going to rush to move to Win 7?

http://gizmodo.com/5366263/the-pink-phone-pictures-microsoft-doesnt-want... We are Micro$oft: we copy all day long! Can you say Palm Pre?

"gadfly10 said: [Win7 is] Definitely not worth the upgrade price. It still has a problem seeing servers in our domain. The new task bar was aped from OS X." I think you might be making a mistake with that last point. I mean, if you copied someone's process for making, say, steel, would your steel be worth less -- or even worthless -- as a result? No. It would be of the same worth. You might argue that MS copied the OSx bar and produced something inferior. Fair enough. But then your point would have nothing to do with it being "aped". You would just mean: "Windows 7 is not worth the upgrade price because it's taskbar isn't as good as that of OSX". But if you did put it in such clear terms, you'd more obviously be making a rather weak argument.

Hmm, can't comment on older posts? Is it just me or is it intentional? Anyway, I need to get my say on Zune, so this is waaayyy OT. Need to mention that I am no great fan of the iTunes bloatware that sucks the life out of my computer, but I have trouble seeing how the Zune software can be so incredibly much better. There was a thread on how to get access to hidden features. Well how about these missing features: A UI that doesn't look like you have lowered the resolution on your hi-res LCD. What's up with the "Collection", "Music", "Videos" and other lables? Heck, all text is kind of hazy and not really sharp. What's hilarious about that is that there are settings to modify display quality. Utter crap! A media collection that does not take 36 hrs to update. I mean I do not have a huge library of media, so this is totally unacceptable. Again there are contradictions; Windows 7 lets me add folders to a library in the windows explorer, and bam - I can watch the contents, even if it is media. If there are tags, I can use them. Why cannot Zune, WMP or iTunes do that? Because it takes about 30 secs to read metadata from a file, and even if you only have 200 artists, we're talking hours to update a library. Unbelievable! How about being able to view pictures by tag? I know, I am a genious! I understand that such innovation doesn't come natural to all. Another feature that would be nice is the possiblity of seeing your entire video collection in the software, not only the Media Center recordings. But, again, I have only waited for 36 hrs for the collection to be updated, and it may still be working. Who knows? It doesn't tell you how it's progressing. Well sometimes; "Found 451 items". Very informative. Especially when it suddenly starts from "1" again. Sorry if the following falls beyond the common logic of most people (I know relativity theory may be easier to grasp) but a darned EQUALIZER? No? I find the Zune interface really crappy. Not that iTunes is better. Actually I'm starting to appreciate good ol' WMP more and more, and that's not very good. Media Center is still the best experience, mostly because you would normally use a remote, and if feels much more natural. Perhaps Zune with remote? Still the graphics... Sorry for the rant

creaky, Windows XP-based infrastructure? Why don't you put a "sold to MS" label on your forehead?

I would agree with you Mike with one caveat. Regardless of which camp you fall in the needs of the business over rule what you want to do at times. I personally want to stop all deployments of Windows 2003 in favor of 2008 R2 especially since its 64bit only. I dont want to deploy any physical servers either, unless there is no way to virtualize, our fax server is a good example of having to stay physical because of the board in it. Its time to move on. I want to move to AD 2008 and Windows 7 because of all of the new group policies and preferences, and do this like yesterday, as we have to hack registry settings into GPO's today. However the CFO would rather the users of our ETAC (Lawson) accounting software do their daily job. We cant move to Windows 7 because right now ETAC has problems with IE8. We have talked about XP mode, but a lot of our remote users of the application only use our TS Server farms from thin clients, to access this application. So on our TS servers still have IE6 so they can access this app. This app is critical app to our company. I guess we could move off of it in favor of something else but that cost would be enormous in software, migration costs alone. We will upgrade out AD to 2008 and push out the preferences XP update. We will move most of our infrastructure to 2008 R2, print servers, file servers, we will move to Exchange 2010. All of that can be moved with out effecting users in a negative way. However Windows 7 will wait. The terminal server farm will wait, POS servers will wait until the third party software is supported on those platforms.

"chuckb84 said: "creaky, Windows XP-based infrastructure? Why don't you put a "sold to MS" label on your forehead?"It's been there for years." Yes. Paul's involved in some nebulous conspiracy. He probably has something to do with those chemtrails too.

The Zune software is waaay better than iTunes. XP is getting so long in the tooth its ridiculous. I did a clean install on a Thinkpad yesterday without the "restore media" and what a pain. Gotta slipstream those sata controllers in there or it wont see your hard drive. And it took forever to install, Windows 7 or Vista for that matter installs in about half the time XP does. XP is insecure frankly Linux is a way better choice for the nubes I support, if they want XP I wont waste an Office license on them. Time to throw that last shovel of dirt on the XP coffin and be done with it.

"We do a silent setup after the image which generates a alphanumeric string for the computer name. (we do this because of a design flaw in OOBE/sysprep process). The problem is that ten or so machines generated the same name" WHHAAAT?? I've successfully installed the same image on about 30 machines here, all with the same hardware, but with differing computer names. You're not doing something right in your preinstallation script. For starters, you should be specifying a new computer name in the Specialize section of the script because if you Generalize the image, the computer name gets randomized unless you have OOBE turned on (with which the end user is allowed to create it - but you want to turn off OOBE on a corporate deployment). MDT 2010 will do those steps for you. If you're still using MDT 2008 or prior, or some other Vista-era deployment tool, that's why it's not working. Sysprep works differently in 7 than it does in Vista, and you need new deployment tools. Luckily MDT is free, and works extremely well. WDS in Server 2008 R2 is also a good addition to have, but the version of Server 2008 also works, you just won't get the driver segregation options in the 08 RTM version. That's handy for image maintenance when you want to deploy a Generalized image onto new hardware that you haven't deployed to yet. You don't have to inject drivers manually into the image with DISM, so it's a joy to use. Drivers are no longer a sore point with new OS deployment. "Paul will wax on and on about all the new bitchen' features, he will then caution the usual, but you should do your due diligence and test the snot out of it, less a mission critical App takes a dump." That's the best advice anyone can give actually. Just don't forget that apps that aren't natively compatible can run under Compatibility Mode (a lot of people forget about that very simple but often effective option in Windows), or short of that, under XP Mode. Working with your software vendors to overcome obstacles with new IT platforms is always recommended too, otherwise the software makers have no motivation to move forward. Bad software companies don't see the revenue potential in keeping business customers up to date when their software when they revert from active development to a skeleton crew for only maintaining support contracts. Bad customers likewise won't move forward until they have to, and then they usually regret the costs incurred with not keeping current when they have to rip out everything when the time comes that they're required to upgrade.

I'm watching the Webminar right now. It's really good.

"Is Win7 ready for Enterprise? Yes." You could say the same with Vista. Webguy3000 makes a good point though, but I'd say that it wasn't enterprises that weren't ready - it was third-party hardware and software vendors (and some in-house developers in some cases) that were holding them back. Any wait time on Windows Vista was more than enough legroom to let enterprises do the necessary testing and training though. Anybody that hasn't tested on anything beyond XP yet will be left in the dust. I'm guessing that they think they'll have the same hardware and software platform forever, which isn't going to happen in reality.

Its been very solid here, but then other companys really use more of the guts than we do. ps holding a WIN 7 party at my house and your all invited. jacuzzi and free ale all night long. Bring ur own woman.