How to do a Windows 7 roll out We know from research we've done with you that lots of you are either knee deep in a Windows 7 roll out, or you're about to be, so we thought we'd try and help. On the 8th of March at 11am we've got a rack of experts talking through the implications of a Windows 7 project. The Register's own Tim Phillips is your host for the …
Why don't I bin my organizations 6000 desktops and do Linux. What a great idea. Never mind that Linux STILL hasn't learned the lesson of "Keep it simple, S£$$£$head"; which MS and Apple BOTH learned over a decade ago.
Linux won't be a contender until it learns the simple fact that the average user is not a developer, is not a science geek, and definitely does not want to know about what version of libc they have, nor how to grep their man pages for the reason why their wireless card manufactured by Belkin but has a chipset by Broadcom won't work with the drivers already available.
You might argue, hell Apple is unix based anyway, so how can I argue that it's a better alternative. Apple spent time learning what their average users want, and tailored their particular OS flavor to ensure that users can do what they do best: carry on working. There's a lot of power under the skin if you want to get into playing around, sure, but for the average user it just plain works. No need to know how to recompile a driver into the kernel. Everything works in a user-logical fashion.
IT do not have the time to handhold users trying to learn an OS that's designed to be tinkered around with. It might be cool and all, but until it's friendly to the average user and EASY to use compared to existing MS and/or Apple software, it's not ready for prime time. Hell no.
3. Realise you are doing the rollout for a major company which uses bespoke and/or industry software packages that do not work with Linux, so following steps 1 and 2 will remove your employees ability to do their jobs.
4. Downvote Tom Welsh for being yet another braindead MS-bashing cretin with no grasp on reality.
I'm guessing you're not in the industry? Many that are simply ignored Windows 7 until it was stable and a service pack released, just like they did with XP, and just like they did with 2000.
The more savvy of us ignored Vista completely because from initial tests knew it was doomed.
What's the point in wasting time, money and energy researching an OS that you're not going to deploy immediately?
Yes I am - with over 6000 workstations to support, going through nearly 600 upgrades over the last year. And since late last year it's been all Windows7 from every major business supplier.
As to Vista - this was ignored from the start, even MS did not take Vista seriously (why else would they extend support for an already aged OS for so long). And no suppliers worth any mention demanded that you only use Vista on their machines (at least none that are in the category of selling business workstations).
You might argue, hell why don't I use my downgrade rights? Sure, you can do this - at the expense of support from the supplier.
I know it's probably too late, but I'm going to make a plea --please include methodology for ensuring multiple users get a uniform user profile on the same machine.
I work in educational IT, an arena that Microsoft seems to pay attention to some of the time, when it suits their purposes. One thing that education needs is a system that supports multiple users, with the exact same profile settings.
While unsupported, with XP you could at least copy the user profile over the default profile. It may have caused a few very minor issues, but it worked. Since then, Microsoft disabled this feature. I understand why they did so --but their solutions are a hodgepodge of "copyprofile=true" in Windows 7 Sysprep (which misses a lot of settings) and then to tell us to use scripting and group policy for the rest.
It isn't like Microsoft couldn't create a great software tool that COULD copy a user profile to default properly, with the correct settings, and properly set permissions. However, it hasn't been done, and I the party line I've seen on the deployment forums is that what they are doing should work fine for our (educational needs), when nothing could be further from the truth. Sysprep is now three times more complicated and takes much, much longer --and for us, the results have been lousy for users that don't have local administrator privileges. I love Windows 7, but it's enough to drive us back to Windows XP as an enterprise.
If El Reg has a better solution, I'd love to see what they're doing.
We are currently about 40% of the way through our migration, and lemme tell ya, it's been a bit of a slog.
Between vendors telling us point blank "we do not support our software on windows 7" to some ancient group policies that decide to randomly frag machines, it's been very stressful for the team that's doing the majority of the planning and implementation work. (myself and six others did most of the up front work with building the image, building new group policies, and managing the actual image deployment and rollout timeframe.)
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