Windows Experience Blog : Deployment

Dell Now Offering Windows 7 Drivers for Commercial Desktops and Laptops

Brandon LeBlanc — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:32:30 GMT

Dell is jumping in to help business (commercial) customers get ready for Windows 7 by offering Windows 7 drivers for their commercial desktop and laptop PCs. They are posting their Windows 7 drivers here (see Drivers and Downloads on left-hand navigation).

By offering drivers for their commercial desktop and laptop PCs, Dell is helping business customers with Dell PCs in their environments prepare for Windows 7 deployments.

For more information, see this blog post on Dell’s Inside Enterprise IT Blog.

PPG Industries continues IT success with Windows Vista

Brandon LeBlanc — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:53:30 GMT

After some positive feedback from our customers about last month’s customer interview with City of Miami, we wanted to provide IT Pros with another dose of real-world, Windows Vista customer insight. Additionally, recognizing the interest in Windows 7 over the past few months, we know IT professionals are wondering whether to upgrade to Windows Vista today or wait for Windows 7. I could give you a whole bunch of reasons for investing in Windows Vista today (security, data protection, etc.), but I thought you’d like to hear from an IT professional like you who has made the move to Windows Vista and is glad he did.

I talked with Mike Calabrese, Senior IT Architect - Global Desktop Services of PPG Industries, one of the world’s leading coatings and specialty materials companies, about what keeps him up at night, and how Windows Vista helps address some of his biggest challenges. Here’s an overview of our conversation:

The Windows Blog: Hi, Mike – thanks for chatting with me. What are the biggest challenges in managing your IT environment?

Mike Calabrese: We are like any other business. We keep a close eye on our key resources: time, money and people. As an internal IT department, my biggest challenge is to be able to provide continuous value to PPG’s large and diverse set of end-users. My focus is global desktop services, so PPG employees are my customers and my work directly impacts their day-to-day productivity and ability to collaborate. I have to find the right balance between delivering the flexibility that my customers need, while doing it in a way that is secure and properly supported … and doing it all in a cost-effective way.

The Windows Blog: Finding a cost-effective way to manage all that sounds like it could be a challenge – how are you controlling it?

Mike Calabrese: Right now, we are in the process of upgrading 26,000 desktops and laptops to Windows Vista. As a global company, servicing 25 different languages in more than 60 countries, one key benefit we’ve seen upfront is the ability to create and deploy one global desktop image, rather than creating a separate built-from-scratch, localized image for each supported language or country. This alone is a huge cost and resource saver.

The Windows Blog: Are there any other benefits you’re seeing from Windows Vista?

Mike Calabrese: Management is another area where Windows Vista adds value. The vast number of group policies provides the ability to customize desktop configurations globally with just a few clicks. One example of this is the configuration of wireless profiles that define our access points globally. Any PPG Vista user can connect to our highly secured access points effortlessly.

And I would say that security is the other key reason why we moved to Windows Vista. From an end-user perspective, security is not the most exciting feature, but it is one of those critical issues for IT. We were looking at third-party products to provide additional security, but after a thorough evaluation, we’ve decided to deploy BitLocker on every machine to take advantage of this added layer of security protection available with Windows Vista, without enduring the additional cost or complexity a third-party security product would introduce into our environment.

The Windows Blog: With features that may not be immediately visible to the end-user, did you find it difficult to get your employees on board? How did you sell the value to your colleagues?

Mike Calabrese: Like you, I’ve heard and read all the criticisms of Windows Vista. In my experience, Windows Vista delivers amazing value and addresses the things I care about the most – reducing costs, empowering our users to be productive, and improving manageability and security. Microsoft has been a good partner throughout our deployment process and we expect to continue to see the business benefits with our move to Windows Vista.

The great news for PPG is that its investment in Windows Vista is paying off now and they will have a much easier upgrade path to Windows 7 when they make the decision to deploy. I’ll be sure to keep you updated as I continue to talk with Windows customers – it’s their experiences and opinions that truly tell the stories of our products.

City of Miami Moves to Windows Vista

Brandon LeBlanc — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:58:00 GMT

I recently had the chance to talk to James Osteen, Assistant Director of the City of Miami's IT Department about their Windows Vista deployment. I thought that many of you could relate to his position and would appreciate his insight into what it takes to keep a major city like Miami up and running.

The Windows Blog: Hi James, thanks for joining us. Tell us a bit about yourself.

James Osteen: I'm James Osteen, an Assistant Director with the City of Miami's IT Department with Infrastructure responsibility. I work with all aspects of our IT infrastructure, including desktops and mainframe, networking, storage, security, and the web. The best part of my job is that it is ever changing...the pace of change in IT allows us to constantly provide more and better services to our citizens and internal clients- and at a lower cost. Let's put it this way, we certainly never get bored!

The Windows Blog: From an IT perspective, what are the top three challenges you face?

James Osteen: That's easy: First is the security of our infrastructure - this isn't something we've had issues with before, but it's always something we're thinking about. We want to be sure our system is secure...our motto is that being prepared before an issue reduces the chance of it happening.

Next would be cost effectiveness of solutions. IT departments can be the first place funding is scaled back, so when we invest in technology, it has to be top notch and show immediate value.

Finally, I'm concerned about the reliability and robustness of service. This is pretty self explanatory, but our job becomes easier if the products we're using are reliable.

The Windows Blog: How do you think Windows Vista can help advance your IT mission and address the challenges you described before?

James Osteen: The mission of the City's IT Department is "to deliver high-quality, focused, aggressive business solutions to the City of Miami by offering consumer-centric services and cost-efficient communications and information technologies."

So to break it down, the security enhancements in Windows Vista have made the operating system one of the most secure options available today, with response times to new security threats that are some of the best in the industry. For us, the deployment of Windows Vista is translating into direct savings for the City and our citizens: it's enabling us to save approximately $80K in power savings through the deployment of GPOs available in Windows Vista, and by migrating from our current mainframe environment to a Windows Server infrastructure, its helping us eliminate approximately $1M in annual costs. That's just the start...these savings are projected to grow to $190K annually within 4 years! And, we expect to see productivity gains through the use of new tools available in Windows Vista, such as desktop search and the snipping tool.

As far as reliability and robustness of service, I have been using the Windows Vista OS in a production environment for 10 months with zero reliability issues. The OS has proven to be highly stable and reliable and one of the side benefits to us from a support standpoint is the "built-in protection of system files." From a robustness of service perspective, we are migrating to a centralized storage platform for our enterprise data. The depth provided by the Offline Files implementation in Windows Vista, including the bitmap differential transfer, makes this goal achievable - it would have been more of a challenge for our clients previously.

The Windows Blog: How many desktop and mobile PCs are you deploying on Windows Vista? In what timeframe?

James Osteen: We plan on migrating approximately 900 desktops/laptops to Vista by end of August 2009.

The Windows Blog: In our current economy, what role does cost savings play in your IT strategy?

James Osteen: Cost savings are becoming increasingly important to our operations with the current economic downturn. We are constantly asked to perform higher levels of service with fewer dollars, and in today's economy this has become even more important. The $1M in mainframe cost savings plus the $80K in power savings alone make this project a no-brainer (not to mention that reducing our carbon footprint is extremely important to us in Florida).

The Windows Blog: Did knowing Microsoft is working on Windows 7 affect your choice to deploy Windows Vista?

James Osteen: The impact of Windows 7 on our decision to move forward was zero. We replace 20% of our desktop/laptop inventory on an annual basis, so that means that desktops we place in production today could have a production life of 5 years... we can't afford to stand still and be rooted in the past. In making our decision to deploy Windows Vista now, we looked more at the immediate benefits that Windows Vista can currently provide our environment - such as cost savings, security, reliability - those factors made the decision an easy one.

The Windows Blog: Would you recommend that other businesses take a look at Windows Vista and consider upgrading?

James Osteen: Absolutely! Any organization concerned with delivering cost effective, secure and reliable services to their clients would be well served taking a hard look at the benefits that Windows Vista can provide to them.