I will admit, I am keeping my old laptop running (in spite of a damaged hard drive connector) until I am ready to buy a new one with Vista and ReadyDrive (yes, I can be a glutton for pain). I want to make sure I am ready and prepared for Vista when it gets deployed here someone in 2009, and I am comfortable with running Virtual PC for those times when XP is necessary.
This will not be my main system at the church, though. I still have plenty that requires XP and will doubtfully be moved up to Vista compatibility anytime soon without considerable cost.
A few days ago I found out that one of our staff members is really pushing for Vista. This is a special situation since he is one of the more computer literate users in the building. His system is specialized and was built under a program we do where the IT department will contribute the amount of money we normally spend on a system and your department pays for the rest. He is one of the few people who have admin access to their own system, and we rarely have to do anything on it.
He has been running Vista at home for a while and loves it, now he wants it at work. The IT opinion so far has come down to these 2 points:
- A Vista site license is not planned in the budget right now, and we have no intention of upgrading anyone anytime soon. Therefore, it would be his out-of-pocket expense.
- We are not currently equipped to support Vista. I have run the Beta for a while, but I am not proficient enough to troubleshoot it in the timely manner dictated by having other users. Therefore, we have told him that we will support it even less than we support the Macs.
Is anyone else considering Vista in any way? Are you allowing rogue systems like this? Any expectations on when you will upgrade?
We won’t allow Vista anywhere on our network right now. We have over 200 desktops/laptops deployed and we simply can’t manage or support even one Vista system until our management and support infrastructure is ready.
What needs to be ready for that to happen?
Is it concern about being able to keep up with that system? Or is it that it may cause unexpected problems to the network?
Do you have any Mac or Linux living around there
In my opinion, Vista needs to stay out of the IT environment until the IT staff have used it extensively and the support is in place. To dangerous to have stuff like that floating around that you know nothing about. Could cause unknown problems, even for others with its networking stuff. Group policies issues are just one more area that will have differences. I haven’t even used Vista myself yet, but I’m hoping to start playing with it soon. If it’s on your network, you’ll be expected to support it at some point…