Susanne Dansey’s Blog

Have you ever woken up in the morning and wondered what day it is? You sit there for a bit trying to remember what you did the day before to try and get your bearings and then you realise that you haven’t overslept for work and it is in fact Sunday! These are always the best as in a small way you feel like you’re getting a day for free… yes I am easily pleased!

Today is a day for getting things done; my company is going to be busy this week with the launch of Vista (more to follow on that later this week) and I am also participating in the long awaited Microsoft SBSC Symposium (more to follow on that later this week also) so I won’t get a lot of time in the office to upgrade my software from Beta to RTM code. I need to do this because I spent Friday afternoon working on a 33-page document and Word 2007 decided it didn’t want to play. So we fell out, and shortly I shall be replacing it for the coding that I hope will stop Word stropping on me (that’s technical speak).

My friends in the Mothership have been so absorbed by Vista that they laugh at my traditional Start button and comment on how old fashioned it looked. For me, the button itself works just fine thank you! and there is absolutely nothing wrong with XP SP2. When I say ‘button’ I mean the thing in the bottom left corner and not the menu that pops up when you press it. In fact, XP SP2 hasn’t stopped me from doing my work but after playing with Vista on some test machines I’ve decided to take the plunge and upgrade from ‘Old Faithful’ to Vista.

So I studied the forums (particularly around my beloved HP NX7010 laptop which sneered at RC1 and the second technical release) and made sure that I had a spare machine to hand JUST IN CASE I needed to use the Internet for help - you know what I’m talking about! We’ve all been there at some point!

Whilst the upgrade is considerably more painful in terms of waiting time, I would now suggest that a clean install isn’t necessarily the only option. Please note that Microsoft recommends a clean install. I would recommend that you backup your PC before you upgrade and you find something to do for a few hours as it gets to work. Don’t sit in front of the machine expecting the progress status to gallop through - the pace for me was more of a casual meander.

Note: stay close to your machines if you have BIOS locked drives as it reboots two or three times during the process.

I sit here typing this as my laptop besides me is nearing the end of the install - hopefully by the end of this post everything will have gone according to plan. One of the problems I had with previous versions was discussed here so I’ve spent the entire installation watching my laptop nervously. There are some cute noises coming from it now so I assume things have gone okay…

My other machine is churning away nicely in front of me as it indexes my data files for the Search facility (which is great) and the automatic driver updates are very useful too. I’m still a bit sceptical about the sidebar; great for home use but can you stop users roaming the ‘cool’ gadgets such as Pull My Finger (I won’t name who showed me this one and laughed)?

One of the things Microsoft emphasises is that 2.5 hours each working day is spent searching for information by a user. The purpose of Search (both in Live Desktop, Vista, and Office) is to reduce this and free up time to be more productive. If I had a boring job and my boss gave me these applications to give me more time on my hands, would I spend it tying up boring loose ends or would I be looking up what else is available under ‘fun and games’? There is a time and a place for everything and it is necessary to ensure users realise that Vista has a wide appeal both in the business forum as well as the lifestyle forum - the trick is to ensure definition and it will be the job of the partners to help enforce it.

Some of the things I have noticed since my Vista install (which now includes my laptop - yey!):

• You have to upgrade OneCare - quick and painless (you’ll need to reboot so don’t get personlising Vista just yet!)
• You have to upgrade Messenger - quick and painless (the same picture profile moves with you wherever you login)
• You will have to turn of the bleeps and cute noises if you had previously disabled them
• The driver updates get to work immediately

But, I still love XP SP2, not because it’s better, but because it works. Vista adds to what XP SP2 offers (not offered) and it’s important to know what the extras are before you try and deploy it to your clients. Whilst I like to embrace new technology, you have to find time to break from your work schedules to implement something like this and you need to do a little bit of planning (i.e. a DR plan just in case the install goes wrong).

It’s great to see that the community, whilst not rolling out Vista to their entire client base, is testing it for themselves so that they can understand what it’s about. When I grumbled about Vista back in November, it wasn’t because the technology was naff, no, in fact the there was nothing wrong with that, it was the way in which members of the MotherShip were presenting it that bothered me…

… in the same way, partners need to decide whether Vista and Office 2007 for themselves. If you are going to say ‘no’ to your clients when they ask (and they will - particularly after January 30th), then you need to have good reasons as to why you recommend they wait for SP1 (end of this year) if at all. A partner’s role is to be responsible for helping their small business clients achieve primarily three things:

• Increased revenue and profitability
• Growth
• Improved productivity

That means we need to be thinking a few steps ahead of them. Our role is to be the IT department they can’t afford to employ or train. Our role is to be what the accountant is to their finances. It isn’t their job to know the in’s and out’s of their server network and they want to know that if they ask about Vista, or any new software application for that matter, that you can guide them down a path that suits them.

If you don’t have the time or resources to play with this stuff then at least have a look through some of the blog feeds that the Vista teams are producing. The easiest to digest would probably come from Matt and James in the PTS team and there are plenty of web meetings and classroom demos that can be found via the Microsoft Events Pages.

After the hype has settled to a manageable hum, the small business market will begin to really impact on Vista sales (particularly via OEM and hardware refreshes). I don’t think that a new OS will make everyone upgrade on their kit and I think Microsoft Office 2007 (I know that’s not the official way of saying it… it’s something like ‘2007 Microsoft Office System’) will be adopted earlier.

Vista has a lot of ‘under the hood’ advantages that most users won’t realise, some will be useful for partners such as the Reliability Monitor, but tools like Search and the ability to share applications via an ad-hoc network will help make every day tasks easier. I was talking to another partner who has been working on the Technology Adoption Programme with us and I showed them a few things that they hadn’t realised. Everyone will find something that they like about these programmes that others don’t and that’s why it is important to expect people to say ‘yes’ even when you say ‘no’ - it’s how you deal with it that’s the trick!

Some are still experiencing driver problems and so be prepared - we suffered this with Toshiba and their M400s but hopefully these kinds of problems will be ironed out shortly.

All in all, whilst we emphasise the importance of user education and training, we also need to understand that the same applies to us. I probably could have upgraded my laptop some weeks ago but I had experienced three failed Vista installs before, didn’t have the time previously, and more importantly, feared the worse so left it.

But I’ve jumped, and am happy to say that I have two machines that are Vistafied!

Now onto upgrading to 2007 Microsoft Office System… the Search tool in Outlook keeps failing and I’m realising that without it, it takes me ages to find emails! Yeah, yeah, Microsoft - so you were right…

p.s. If you are able to attend the pre-event this Wednesday night then at least four Vista bods will be attending from MS so it’ll be an opportunity to chat more on your experiences of it yourself!