Susanne Dansey’s Blog

Both internally and within the Partner Community, there has been much discussion surrounding the anticipated launch of the first Vista Service Pack (SP1).

There has been a number of people advising customers to wait for this release before adopting Windows Vista.

Important updates have been released to customers via Windows Update and I’m happy to share with you that since Vista reached Return To Manufacturer (RTM) in November 2006, Microsoft has continued to make improvements to the Windows customer experience, working with Partners to improve device coverage and application compatibility. The number of supported devices has increased from 1.5 million to 2.2 million. Over 2,000 applications to date have the ‘Works with Windows Vista’ and ‘Certified for Windows Vista’ logos, resulting in organisations and individuals benefiting from the improved security, management, and deployment benefits of Windows Vista today.

What is Windows Vista Service Pack 1?

Windows Vista SP1 is an update to Windows Vista that, along with improvements delivered to users via Windows Update, addresses feedback from our customers. While SP1 contains valuable updates to Windows, organisation don’t need to wait to deploy and can can experience the benefits of Windows Vista today.

In addition to previously released updates, SP1 also continues to imrpove upon the IT administration experience. SP1 is not intended to be a vehicel for releasing new features; however some existing components do gain enhanced functionality in SP1.

Windows Vista SP1 is designed to not significantly change the UI or cause regressions in application compatibility.

Microsoft are encouraging customers and Partners to begin with any planned Windows Vista evaluations and deployment now.

A customer ready white paper discussing best practices for running a pilot can be found here.

Windows Vista SP1 improves the reliability of Windows Vista in many areas. According to Microsoft, many of the crashes and blue screens experienced by users stem from problems with 3rd party apllications and drivers, and so they are working with partners to solve these together. Other problems occur entirely in Windows code so they are aggressively working to solve as many of them as possible.

Some of these improvements are made available before SP1 in the August updates available via Windows Update and the Download Centre.

• SP1 includes support for some of these new innovations, which are expected to become increasingly important in the coming years. For example:
• With SP1, Windows Vista can boot via Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
• SP1 supports ExFAT, a new file format that will be used in flash memory storage and consumer devices
• Support for SD Advanced DMA Support to improve transfer performance and decrease CPU utilisation is part of SP1
• SP1 includes a series of new API’s and software features to enable 3D application and game developers to make more complete and efficient use of the upcoming generation of graphics Direct3D 10.1 hardware.
• Windows Vista SP1 includes Secure Sockets Tunnel Protocol (SSTP), a remote access VPN tunneling protocol that will be part of Mcirosoft’s Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) platform. SSTP helps provide full-network VPN remote access connections without some of the challenges that other VPN tunnels face traversing NAT, web proxies, and firewalls.

When Microsoft say that SP1 has an ‘improved management experience’, they mean:

• With Windows Vista SP1, BitLocker Drive Encryption has been enhanced to not only fully encrypt the entire Windows Vista volume but also any or all additional locally created data volumes (You can now fully encrypt C:, as well as D: and E:)
• SP1 improves printer management by addressing problems associated with printing to a local printer from within a Terminal Server session.
• Network diagnostics in Window Vista SP1 will help users with the most common file sharing problems, in addition to basic problems already supported.
• SP1 includes an update to Disk Defragmenter so administrators can control which volumes the disk defragmenter runs on.

Thanks to Adam for highlighting an omission about the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) from this article which should be mentioned:

The tools used to manage Group Policy for Windows Vista will change with the installation of Windows Vista Service Pack 1. GPMC will be uninstalled with Service Pack 1 and GPEdit will default to Local Group Policy editing. Following these changes, SP1 users can download an updated version of GPMC that contains much requested functionality including the ability to add comments to GPOs or individual settings, to search for specific GP settings, and to use Starter GPOs which encapsulate best practices.

Expect to see SP1 (approx 50MB over Windows Update) delivered during the first quarter of 2008.

(adapted from a Microsoft communication) E&OE