1. Change management and training for Vista and Office 2007. Vista's enhanced look and feel, coupled with the new user interface for Office 2007, will certainly offer usability benefits in the long term. However, companies will have to contend with a large training hump. Indeed, existing power users have already reported feeling alienated without the familiar file menus, and non-power users will have questions regarding newly discovered tools.
In the beginning, you can expect productivity to dip across the board as all users climb the learning curve. Calls to the help desk will spike for several weeks—perhaps by as much as 35%. New hires accustomed to older productivity tools will require more time than usual to ramp up. For IT staff, training will be needed to deploy and support Vista and Office 2007. Initial three- to five-day training for basic deployment, administration, help-desk support, and network management costs $2,500 to $3,500 per IT employee.
Although XML-based Office 2007 file formats will ultimately benefit application development, they'll pose significant challenges to document management, collaboration, and compatibility. Companies must develop a strategy for how new Office documents will be managed and shared to ensure that business partners and non-Office 2007 users aren't marginalized.
Many early adopters are also expressing frustration with Windows Vista's User Account Control (UAC). The new feature is designed to improve security by managing user privileges at a more granular level. However, many users are finding that frequent pop-ups and warnings hinder the performance of common tasks such as installing or running certain applications. Security vendor Symantec has already alluded to developing usability enhancements to Vista's UAC.
2. Hardware requirements for Vista Premium. Many PCs now running Windows XP can't support Vista. For the first time, enterprises are seeing video capabilities as a potential barrier to OS adoption. IT buyers must marry the Vista-adoption decision to their hardware-upgrade cycle and factor new hardware as well as setup costs into migration budgets. At approximately $1,500 for a Vista-capable PC/notebook, the hardware expenses can easily surpass the cost of the licenses.
If you're procuring the new software from an OEM, beware of the associated restrictions, such as those pertaining to the creation of software images and the redeployment of licenses to other machines. Having a Microsoft Volume Licensing Agreement or buying SA within 90 days of purchase can mitigate these risks.
Also emerging as a barrier to adoption is the lack of hardware drivers currently available for Vista. Before you migrate, test devices such as sound cards, Web cams, and Wi-Fi cards for compatibility.
3. System upgrades and consolidation for Exchange 2007. Migrating to Exchange 2007 is resource-intensive, requiring new hardware, upgrades in network capacity, and server and storage consolidation. It can easily cost thousands of dollars more than the initial $4,000 licensing fee to deploy Exchange 2007.
Exchange 2007 is a 64-bit-only platform, meaning that even companies just looking to use core functionality still have to incur additional hardware costs. For example, supported servers must contain Intel or AMD x64 processors, which run at least $6,000. Moreover, Exchange 2007 requires multiple physical machines to accommodate the three distinct server roles of client-access, mailbox, and transport. The increased server footprint puts Exchange 2007 squarely at odds with the trend toward efficiency via server consolidation and virtualization.
Since Exchange 2007 supports only new server installations, you can't execute an in-place upgrade from a previous version. IT will have to duplicate the environment and move it over to new machines, increasing labor costs and complexity. To fully enjoy Exchange 2007's unified-messaging enhancements, companies with distributed Exchange 2000 or even Exchange 5.5 installations will have to consolidate their Exchange platforms. They'll also need to consolidate, if not expand, storage in order to simplify backup-and-recovery initiatives and enable message archiving for compliance purposes. And network capacity will become an issue as voice, data, and fax compete for bandwidth.
4. Integration with third-party and in-house applications. Third-party tools and in-house applications can add significantly to configuration and testing, pushing deployment time lines out by as much as six to 12 months. Before deploying Vista or Office 2007, assess the changes that might be necessary to any existing desktop-management tools, VPN clients, antivirus software, backup tools, or other client-side software. Existing in-house applications will also have to be tested for compatibility.
The same is true for Exchange 2007. Consider how the new functionality will affect third-party applications such as security, antivirus software, and mobile add-ons. While some 32-bit add-ons may require upgrades, others will have to be examined and prioritized to determine applicability in light of new Exchange 2007 features that may provide an adequate replacement.
Windows UAC is another new feature that may compromise application functionality by limiting administrative rights. When migrating applications, identify business-critical software that needs to run with root privileges. Windows Vista may not allow these applications to run properly with UAC activated.
5. Vista product activation and validation via Activation 2.0 and the new Software Protection Platform (SPP). Already termed the "Vista Kill Switch," SPP introduces two major changes: periodic reactivation, so enterprises can't simply activate once and forget about it; and a reduced-functionality mode, which limits access to PC files and menu options when machines are deemed improperly activated. Network connectivity of PCs and software-asset management should be prerequisites to Vista adoption. Risk-averse companies may want to wait for glitches to be resolved before deploying.
