Microsoft releases Vista to businesses
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Microsoft Corp. launched its first new computer operating system in five years Thursday, saying that despite delays, the product's emergence is perfectly timed for PC users who increasingly need to coordinate information from a dizzying array of sources.
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Microsoft's operating system from 1.0 to Vista.
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NEW YORK/LONDON  - Microsoft Corp. rolled out  Windows Vista at retailers in 70 countries on Tuesday,  delivering a PC operating system that aims to better manage the  explosion of digital media and protect users from the dangers  of the Internet.
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Microsoft Corp. has released a near-final version of its new Windows Vista operating system to a select group of technical experts who are testing the software.
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Microsoft Corp.  said on Tuesday  that is has begun widespread testing of Windows Vista, the  long-awaited new version of the operating system that sits on  more than 90 percent of the world's PCs.
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Microsoft has released a list of 800 applications it has officially verified as running  bug-free on Windows Vista.
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(InfoWorld) - In the first year of its release, Microsoft Corp. is expecting businesses to adoptÂ Windows Vista twice as fast as any other version of Windows, with 10 times as many Vista business seats deployed at launch than any previous release of the OS. Despite this optimism, analysts still don't expect businesses to begin adopting Vista in earnest until late 2007 or even 2008, with many waiting for the first service pack version of Vista before they begin considering an upgrade. One reason Microsoft is expecting Vista to be so successful is that the company has made a concerted effort to give customers the tools and training they need to adopt Vista across their businesses, said Brad Goldberg, general manager of the Windows Client Business Group at Microsoft. The company also put test versions of the OS into as many people's hands as possible. For the previous Windows migration, to Windows XP, Microsoft didn't release important tools to help businesses upgrade -- such as a compatibility toolkit to ensure existing applications will work -- until Service Pack 2, which was released nine months after Windows XP shipped, he said. However, with Windows Vista, "we made the beta of the [compatibility] toolkit available with Windows Vista Beta 2," Goldberg said. Microsoft also has opened up test versions of the OS to a wide audience, making Release Candidate 1 (RC1) available to the public. Microsoft expects that at least 5 million users will have access to Vista RC1, all of whom the company has encouraged to provide feedback about the release so it can be as polished as possible before it goes out to business customers in November. Another reason Microsoft expects businesses to warm to Vista early is that the company is doing its share to educate customers on how much money they can save by adopting it, Goldberg said. Microsoft has worked with analysts to develop customer case studies to see how much money business customers can save per PC by upgrading to Vista from their current OS. Al Gillen, an analyst with research firm IDC, does not dispute Microsoftâs calculations for the return on investment (ROI) companies will make on Windows Vista, though he says that companies âdonât get the âRâ unless they put in the âIâ first.â âThe ROI story is exciting, but it requires that customers be mature and agile enough to do what they need to do afterwards,â Gillen said. And while Microsoft may meet its ambitious first-year goals for Vista, that momentum will likely peter out, once pent-up demand has been met, Gillen said. âEighteen months out, the adoption curve will look like any other Windows product,â Gillen said. âItâs hard to move corporate customers faster than they are willing to go.â Microsoftâs bullish projections donât appear to jibe with most current third-party customer surveys, such as one online survey of 314 IT professionals conducted by Computerworld in August. Just 17 percent of IT professionals say they are considering rolling out Windows Vista in the first year. Forty-one percent of respondents said they had no plans to roll out Vista, while 35 percent said they would begin testing Vista only after it ships. Of those who said they were considering rolling out Vista in the near or long-term, the largest group (29 percent) said the cost was the biggest determinant of if and when they would upgrade. That was followed by the hardware requirements (16 percent), the amount of employee training (6 percent) and the amount of IT staff retraining (4 percent). Even if Microsoft doesn't meet its goals for Vista, it's not likely to affect the company's revenue. According to one financial analyst firm, Microsoft stands to lose only about $400 million in revenue in fiscal 2008 if Vista business adoption does not go according to the company's plan, and $2 billion in fiscal 2009. In its most recent fiscal year ended June 30, Microsoft reported more than $44 billion in revenue. While the company is optimistic about adoption in its marketing, it is being far more conservative in its financial estimates, analysts said. This is obviously good news for Microsoft, but there is a downside. The longer Vista is available, the more it will cost the company if businesses continue to hold off on adopting the OS. And any negative press or analyst feedback on lackluster Vista adoption could drive Microsoft's stock price down, analysts said. (Eric Lai is a senior writer at Computerworld.)
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Microsoft Corp.  launched  Windows Vista for businesses on Thursday, unveiling the first  major upgrade of its dominant operating system in five years  and predicting that over 200 million people will run new  Windows, Office or PC server software by the end of 2007.
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Despite initially saying it wouldn't be made public, Microsoft late Monday released Windows Vista Build 5536 for download by those who had signed up for the Beta 2 Customer Preview Program. The catch: only 100,000 visitors will be able to download before the links are deactivated.
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Updated OS includes software applications designed for business users.
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In what analysts are calling a significant move, Microsoft on Tuesday released Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2005, promising full compatibility with Windows Vista and Office 2007.
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Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday released new test versions of what company co-founder Bill Gates called its three most important products: Windows Vista for desktop computers, Windows for servers and the Office business software suite.
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Ease of Access Centre gets thumbs up Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system has just been released for corporate consumption.â¦
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Microsoft has launched the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment public beta.
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Microsoft's long, strange trip with Windows Vista came closer to an end Friday as the company released the first release candidate of its next-generation operating system. Jim Allchin made the announcement in an e-mail to TechNet subscribers.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. released tools to help companies deploy Windows Vista, acknowledging that there are deployment and application-compatibility pains enterprise IT managers face when updating business desktops to the new OS. The company unveiled the new tools, Data Encryption Toolkit for Mobile PCs and Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) Test Drive, atÂ the TechEd 2007 conference in Orlando Tuesday. The first helps IT administrators set encryption policies for laptops in an enterprise using the encrypting file system and new Bitlocker features of Windows Vista, said Stella Chernyak, a Vista product manager at Microsoft. The second is a file that can be downloaded from the Internet that allows enterprises to run a virtual version of Vista on PCs for a 30-day evaluation period to see how it will interact with other applications in their systems. The VHD Test Drive is available online, and more information on the Data Encryption Toolkit can be found on Microsoft's Web site. Business adoption of Vista has been a big concern since the OS was released to business customers last November. Many companies said they would hold off on fully deploying the OS longer than they usually do mainly because of concerns about application compatibility. Indeed, Chernyak acknowledged Tuesday in an interview that lack of application compatibility is the biggest challenge enterprise customers face when they deploy Vista. She said this is why Microsoft released the Vista Application Compatibility Toolkit simultaneously with the general availability of the OS instead of some time after, which it has traditionally done. The VHD also gives enterprises a chance to see what applications will be affected by the new OS so they can make compatibility adjustments before investing in Vista. Three of Microsoft's large enterprise customers, Continental Airlines, Charter Communications and health-care company Cerna Corp. also will have major Vista deployments in their enterprise by the end of the year, Chernyak said. Microsoft claims most enterprises are on schedule to a full rollout of Vista 12 to 18 months after its release, which is about normal for a new Windows OS, she said. Still, not everyone is rushing to deploy Vista, and smaller companies in particular are wary of adopting the OS until making certain it will work with everything in their systems. TechEd attendee Ryan Engh, infrastructure manager at 130-person mutual funds company Wasatch Advisors in Salt Lake City, said his company is still about 12 months from beginning a Vista deployment, though two IT staff members are "playing with it" to see how it will interact with applications in the system. "We'd be more aggressive if it wasn't such a drastic change in the operating system," he said. Engh said he was not aware of the new deployment tools from Microsoft, but likely would not use them anyway because he is currently more concerned with application compatibility than actually deploying the OS. "I'm not so worried about the deployment, it's just if the application will actually work on the system," he said. "We're not even worried about [deploying Vista] yet." Microsoft also said at TechEd that it would make its previously announced Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) available by July for Windows Vista with a new feature for monitoring desktop errors so IT managers can identify errors and send a fix across all enterprise desktops at once. MDOP, unveiled in January, consists of software from Microsoft's purchases of Softricity, AssetMetrix, Winternals Software, and DesktopStandard. It rolls up virtualization software from Softricity, asset-management software from AssetMetrix, group policy-management software from DesktopSoftware, and diagnostic and recovery tools from Winternals into a product designed to help companies manage desktops in an enterprise. The Softricity and Winternals components of the pack are already available for Windows XP, said Winni Verhoef, a senior product manager for Microsoft. All of the components of MDOP will be available for Vista in July except the Winternals diagnostic and recovery tools, which won't be available until next year. It is taking Microsoft a bit more time to port those tools to Vista because they had to be rewritten for the new architecture of the client OS, he said. MDOP costs about US$10 per desktop and is available only to Microsoft customers who have purchased its Software Assurance service. Â
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By Josh Brown, The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif.  Jan. 31--Microsoft's long-awaited operating system Windows Vista was  released to the public on Tuesday, but few consumers took notice.