Dimension Data hasn't wasted any time jumping on the Windows Vista SP1 bandwagon, rolling out the service pack to its Australian users after just a 10-day pilot of the final release.
Roughly half of DiData's internal desktops are running on Vista, with the service company one of the first to deploy the operating system after it was released to corporate users in late 2006.
While Vista is DiData's recommended operating environment, half of its users are still running Windows XP.
According to chief information officer Anthony Stevens, the main reason for that is that several browser-based applications won't run effectively in Internet Explorer 7, which is the only option for Vista users. "Those apps are IE6 dependent, and with Vista that was an issue," he said.
With most of those compatibility issues now fixed by application vendors, Stevens hopes to switch the remaining user base this year. "In the next six months, we'll be able to slowly but surely refresh people's machines."
However, the half of users using Vista have already been updated to SP1. According to Stevens, the final pilot of the release-to-manufacturing version of SP1 was swift at just a matter of days, but only because smaller trials had been taking place during the almost-year-long development process for SP1.
"We need to put that in context," Stevens told ZDNet Australia. "We've been running a managed operating environment and as such have been able to pilot in very small groups the releases that have come out from Microsoft over the last four or five months.
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"We packaged the release and had it distributed via Systems Management Server to a number of machines in production. Typically, we ringfenced half a dozen guys and pushed out a candidate; they'd run it for a month and we'd have a formal feedback loop. We'd then re-image that machine." "We've taken betas and release candidates right up until a couple of weeks before the release came out. Once the RTM came out, we just did some regression testing and made sure everything was as expected, as indeed it was."
Vista has acquired something of a reputation for sluggishness, but Stevens said that SP1 had made a noticeable difference. "There are certainly some performance enhancements which we've noticed around file transfer and accessing servers," he said. "The responsiveness of the OS is also a lot better."
Further ahead, DiData is examining switching its systems over to the recently released Windows Server 2008, though no firm time frame has been set.
"We're certainly looking at it at the moment," Stevens said. "I'm very aware of the benefits associated with 2008 on the backend and Vista on the front end."
