Any Irish organisations banning Vista, office 2007 & IE7 like DOE (US)?

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ajapale

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Im interested whether any irish public/private sector organisations are following the US Federal (DOE) Government's example.

"Based on our initial analysis (from internal recommendations and analysis by Gartner Group), there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft products," according to the memo from Daniel Mintz, DOT Chief Information Officer.
In fact, there are a number of reasons for not upgrading, Mintz said, including the hardware/software/services costs of upgrading; backward compatibility problems with Office 2007, specifically Word (I'm guessing he's referring to the new XML file formats here, but not sure); internal funding limitations; and a pending DOT headquarters move.
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Surely deciding not to upgrade is not the same as "banning"?

XML file formats for Word are not new in Office/Word 2007. They have been there for a long time now.
 
ClubMan said:
Surely deciding not to upgrade is not the same as "banning"?

XML file formats for Word are not new in Office/Word 2007. They have been there for a long time now.
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Its makes better headline in the media to say banning. When XP came out lots or big organisations and corporated waiting until SP1 before switching. We're still on SP1 and not SP2 at work.
 
Sorry Clubman,

I should have asked has any Irish Public/Private sector organisations put ....."an indefinite moratorium on these upgrades"?

aj

aircobra19 said:
Why?
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Because I once worked for a company that delayed upgrading to windows95 for several years and then delayed upgrading to w2k for several years (they skipped windows98), delayed upgrading to XP until 2005/6!
 
aircobra19 said:
Its makes better headline in the media to say banning. When XP came out lots or big organisations and corporated waiting until SP1 before switching. We're still on SP1 and not SP2 at work.
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Yeah - we only upgraded to SP2 early last year if I recall correctly and have a moratorium on Vista. But we're an indigenous Irish company. Mind you our IT department are the usual story - lots of procedures and lots of missing the bigger picture - e.g. assigning default account passwords like "password01" that cannot be changed for three months, having a rule against any firewall other than the XP firewall (incoming traffic checks only) on laptops allowing Outlook Web Access over http rather than https etc. :rolleyes:
 
"allowing Outlook Web Access over http rather than https"

Clubman,

What's involved in setting up Outlook Web Access over https?
Interested to hear this as using Outlook web for years over http. Is the http "very" unsafe?

techman
 
techman said:
What's involved in setting up Outlook Web Access over https?
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.
Interested to hear this as using Outlook web for years over http. Is the http "very" unsafe?
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Well everything over http is in the clear so anybody could eavesdrop at any point between the user and the server whereas https is encrypted. Of course the email transferred over the secure link may itself be unencrypted in which case the information may be travelling in the clear between sender and recipient anyway.

A better way to access corporate email on the move is probably via VPN but again this just deals with end to end security between user and Exchange server and not end to end between email sender and recipient necessarily.
 
Every time a new Microsoft OS comes out it's the same old story. When XP came out people were saying it was terrible/going to be banned by companies/blah blah.

There is no need to upgrade to Vista if you are happy with XP. The only people who will "need" to upgrade to Vista are gamers - DirectX10 (used for graphics, etc.) is only being released on Vista.

There's been a lot of talk about Vista requiring massive amounts of RAM and processing power, etc. I've installed it on a PC in work (512 Megs RAM and 1.5 Ghz processor) and it runs fine.
 
How about drivers? Do all your existing hardware (printers, scanners, TV-cards etc) still work? My recently purchased HP Laserjet 1018 printer is not supported. I'd say very few companies will take it on in the short or medium-term as it'll cause no-end of incompatibility headaches within a typical organisation's variety of hardware. Users would have to be trained on the new user interface. Chillingly, Microsoft has predicted that Vista would lead to thousands of new jobs being created.....in other words, it will create higher support costs for everyone. There don't seem to be any strong reasons to move unless you've moving from Windows NT, 95 or 98.
 
Technologist said:
There don't seem to be any strong reasons to move unless you've moving from Windows NT, 95 or 98.
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Any word on when MS will be declaring end of life/support for NT? There are still plenty of people running it happily but as soon as it stops getting patched then it's time to worry (unless it's run in a well firewalled quarantined environment).
 
ClubMan said:
Any word on when MS will be declaring end of life/support for NT? There are still plenty of people running it happily but as soon as it stops getting patched then it's time to worry (unless it's run in a well firewalled quarantined environment).
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I think they did about a year ago :eek:
 
Oh! . I thought that they normally maintained support for the previous two version of Windows at any time so only expected NT to be dumped once Vista was released but it looks like this happened a lot earlier.
 
See this story [broken link removed] on ZdNet.

Apparently, if you get an e-mail with an infected attachment, Microsoft's 'OneCare' program (pronounciation?), which I think is part of Vista, may decide to delete some or all of your mail, just to be on the safe side....

They're looking into it.
 
I know of some of the big American financial institutions looking at desktop virtualization...

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9003227

This will shake things up massively.

No more local PCs, just a Windows or Linux OS running on a mainframe through VMWare and the noughties version of a dumb terminal.

This is re-igniting the thin-client desktop and app server discussion that was all the rage before the big bust in 2001.
 
I spent a few months mid last year working in one of the LARGE Irish banks and they were still using (mostly) NT on their desktops - apparently a previous IT director wanted then to sweat their assets.
 
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