Getronics Offers Windows Vista Deployment Tips

Corrected: May 23, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Dutch IT services giant Getronics knows a thing or two about large-scale Windows desktop deployments. With 25,000 employees operating in 20 counties, the company counts 17 of the world's top financial services firms as customers. Last week, Getronics' global solutions director Lee Nicholls provided some tips on how to make your Windows Vista deployment as painless as possible.

Getronics started working with Windows Vista a year-and-a-half ago as part of Microsoft's Technology Adoption Program (TAP). Nicholls has been involved in many of Getronics' Vista engagements and has found that large-scale deployments of 10,000 or more Vista seats should be much easier than deploying Windows XP.

Deploying Windows Vista can bring financial benefits, but only if companies do it right, Nicholls says. "Companies have to figure out when Windows Vista is right for them," he says. "It's a brilliant product with great benefits. But if you don't do it at the right time," you won't get all the benefits.

Perhaps the biggest benefit Vista can bring to administrators' lives is a new operating system image-management feature. With previous releases of Windows, every time a company wanted to change a setting or apply a patch, it would require rebuilding the entire master image and then shipping it out over the network or via optical disk to the individual desktops, where it would be installed and deployed, Nicholls says.

"But Vista has a modular image, so if you change a piece of it, you don't have to create an entire new master image," he says. "Before, it could take four weeks to create a new master image. Now, you can make changes to the image without having to remaster the image." As a result, Windows Vista images are much smaller--around 1.5 GB--compared to the 4 to 5 GB images required by XP, making Vista images more network-friendly, and speeding the deployment process.

The new modular imaging feature in Vista will also cut down on the number of images an enterprise must maintain for all of its operations. Nicholls once visited a company that had to maintain 96 different images of Windows XP for all the different versions and languages it had to support. Vista modular imaging gives companies more fine-grained control over the images, resulting in fewer images to maintain.

Vista's more advanced image management translates into savings, Nicholls says. He cited a study that found best practice deployment techniques (which includes using Vista's new imaging features) would save an average of $52 per seat per year. That's half a million dollars for a 10,000-seat organization. That savings figure increases to more than $200 per-seat per-year when other best practices are followed, including using BitLocker drive encryption, Vista's centrally managed firewall, new User Account Control (UAC) settings to restrict users from changing operating system settings, and utilization of Systems Management Server (SMS) to push out updates.

But Vista can bring cost-saving benefits to users, not just administrators, Nicholls says. In particular, he notes Vista's indexing and search feature, which he says is one of the highlights of the new operating system.

"I'm not even using folders, just one big bin," Nicholls says. "Vista is so good, as long as I've called things sensibly, I'm going to get results instantly when I type in keywords. When [Windows XP] does an index, it can be pretty invasive. Vista just seems to tick away in the background."

But Nicholls saves his biggest praise for the combination of Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. "The level of connectivity and collaboration that Office and Exchange have--we've never seen anything like this," he says. When Office Communication Server 2007 ships later this year, it should get even better. "It's just going to be amazing," he says.

Nicholls says the rule of thumb in the past--that enterprises should wait until the first service pack of a new release of Windows desktop before jumping in--is no longer valid. "It's a lot more stable than previous systems," he says. "It was the pattern not to deploy until the first service pack, but to be honest, Vista is a complete product. It doesn't need to wait for the first service pack."

Nicholls encourages CIOs on the fence about Vista to ask themselves these questions: "Do you think you're current business is good enough? Do you want to be more agile and make more money? [Vista enables users to be] more collaborative, communicate better, more secure as they roam around. It's a much richer product, and it's going to help you get IT off the cost center on the balance sheet. You can't really do that with XP."

This article has been corrected. Lee Nicholls' name was misspelled. IT Jungle regrets the error.

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