Patchy outlook for Vista early adopters

With Vista due for release concerns about its readiness arise

Microsoft’s Windows Vista will be made available to volume licensees later this week, amid concerns that the software is not completely ready for deployment and that enterprise customers may wish to postpone upgrades.

In tests on the release version of Vista, IT Week Labs found that drivers were not installed for some components such as graphics subsystems, and these issues had to be manually fixed. IT Week has also been contacted by readers with similar issues.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has hinted that Vista is still a work in progress, even though its code was officially finalised earlier this month. Writing on the Windows Vista blog, Microsoft’s Jim Allchin said the firm will make greater use of Automatic Updates to deliver improvements to the platform.

“When you use Windows Vista for the first time, you will notice that the system asks if you want to check for any updates. And don’t be surprised when the system downloads some updates – in fact you should expect it,” Allchin said. “[Using this mechanism] Windows Vista will continuously get better and better, automatically.”

Some UK IT managers remain unmoved by the prospect of Vista, however. Jane Kimberlin, IT director at Domino’s Pizza, said that while mobile advancements and quad-core chips offer “very exciting” prospects, she was “not sure how much Windows Vista will change anything for us or industry in general”.

Gordon Frazer, Microsoft’s UK managing director, conceded that his firm needs to convey the core Vista benefits to enterprises. “We’ve got to help companies understand what upgrading will mean for them,” he said. “There are significant benefits around productivity, security and total cost of ownership reductions. Firms need to make a choice of whether they want those benefits now.”

Frazer added that early-adopter customers could have “unique” reasons for upgrading, for example using the BitLocker encryption tool to protect against data losses if laptops are stolen, and reducing the number of IT images they need to manage. He added that Microsoft has built in migration and data-transfer tools to make it easy for customers to deploy Vista.