Until now there were a couple of ways to determine if your applications were compatible with Windows 7 – you can test everything, look them up one-by-one in the Windows Compatibility Center, or inventory your production machines using the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 and synchronize your inventory with hosted compatibility data from Microsoft and ISVs. For about a year, we’ve been posting regular updates to the Windows Vista Application Compatibility List for IT pros and even though compatibility between Windows Vista and Windows 7 is pretty high, there has still been huge demand for a Windows 7-specific list. If you already have a list or inventory of the applications you want to move forward in a Windows 7 deployment, the new Windows 7 Application Compatibility List for IT Professionals lets you download a spreadsheet of known vendor-supported applications so that you can query the list against your pre-existing application inventory. This list represents a sample of the total ecosystem focusing on top products as defined by customers and deployments with a public statement of support provided by the vendor.
As you can see, there is compatibility status listed for both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows 7, plus each application’s major and minor version numbers are listed to help normalize your data queries. Since October (yes, last month) we have already collected more than 5500 applications and the list is growing every day. If you are working through a list of hundreds or thousands of applications, this list will help you validate your applications more quickly. We will be updating this list regularly, so keep checking back to avoid any unnecessary testing. Click here to download the spreadsheet and get started.
If you are in the process of testing in-house developed applications, download the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) and use its in-box evaluators and test tools. Although we released ACT 5.5 back in April coinciding with Windows 7’s RC release, there were no changes needed to support the RTM version of Windows 7. Even though you will see an occasional “RC” in ACT’s reports, ACT 5.5 is the RTM-supporting version.
To access these and other application compatibility resources, check out the Springboard Application Compatibility Zone where we host the latest application compatibility content for Windows 7.
Jeremy Chapman
Windows Deployment