Vista Deployment Postmortem

Many organizations are still pondering whether and when to deploy Windows Vista. With the recent release of SP1, those who were planning to “wait for the first service pack” might soon be taking the plunge.

Before they do, however, they’ll probably reach out to other admins who have already deployed Vista for a heart-to-heart about the experience. When you’re going somewhere you’ve never been before, you’d like to be able to get there without running into detours, roads under construction, and bridge trolls. Hearing from others who have made the trip before you will help you know what landmarks to look for and plot alternative routes around problem areas.

My organization recently deployed Windows Vista Business, and I might be able to help you enjoy your trip to the same destination by sharing two things. The first is the positive experiences of our deployment. Maybe you can expand upon our experiences and make your deployment all the better. The second and perhaps more important is what I wish I’d known beforehand or spent more time on in research, during testing, or both.

The Positives
Overall, our implementation went extremely well, despite the bad press that Vista’s received. We feared that the publicity would prejudice our users to think that “Vista is bad” before we even began—and it did, but our deployment went well enough to allay any initial user pushback. The things we did right included replacing all PCs, showcasing the new systems at a company meeting, and investing in an extended warranty with onsite service.

New hardware. One of the first decisions we made that, in hindsight, was a good one, was to lease brand-new equipment, both monitors and computers, rather than upgrade our existing systems. There were two reasons for this decision. First, many of our existing machines were simply incapable of running Vista even if we upgraded them—most were four- or five-year-old IBM NetVistas with 256MB of RAM and integrated graphics. Second, many of the machines had outlived their useful service life and their components were beginning to fail. One benefit of Vista that we proclaimed to our users was the Aero interface, especially the Flip 3D feature. We wanted our users to have the best Vista experience possible, and that couldn’t happen with the equipment we had in service.

Identical equipment under excellent warranty. Our existing systems had been purchased through several different channels in an attempt to obtain the best price at the time. The result was a mishmash of warranty coverage that ranged from one to three years for different PCs. When a component such as a power supply failed, we often had to buy a replacement part out of pocket rather than have it replaced under warranty. Even systems that remained under warranty didn’t have on-site support coverage, which caused us to spend a considerable amount of time repairing failed systems.

For our Vista deployment, we made sure that all our new equipment was identical in every way, shape, and form. We also obtained a warranty that includes next-business-day onsite service for the length of the lease, which let us easily swap components and replace faulty components and machines almost immediately. This warranty has already paid for itself half a dozen times.

All the new computers support dual monitors out of the box. Previously, when a user requested and received approval for dual monitors, we had to open the user’s machine and install a video card and drivers. Now we simply plug in a new monitor, which is a huge time saver for us and for the user. Ensuring that machines support dual monitors might just be common sense, but I wish that someone who had more common sense than I did at the time had reminded me of it four years ago when we were deploying Windows XP.

Standard image. Our primary piece of software is a .NET Web application, so our most valued Microsoft application is Internet Explorer (IE). Our users also run Microsoft Office, with Adobe Reader rounding out the software suite that 90 percent of our users rely on. The remaining 10 percent use a handful of specialized applications, but not everyone in that 10 percent uses the same applications.

As a result of our users’ application needs, we decided to build one Windows Imaging Format (WIM) image and deploy it to all users. For users who were in the “special 10 percent,” we either installed the specialized applications manually or deployed them through Group Policy. This approach was very successful, allowing us to create an image that requires less maintenance longterm as the applications are upgraded.

Separate OU for Vista machines. For our Vista machines, we created a new organizational unit (OU) and Vista-specific Group Policy Objects (GPOs) that we linked only to that OU. This approach let us test all new Vista-specific settings and make changes to them without affecting the installed base of XP machines. By letting us modify settings on only the new machines and quickly see the results in production, the new OU and GPOs had already paid for themselves by the time we’d finished our initial 20-machine rollout.

Introduction of new systems. At a company- wide meeting, we showcased the new equipment and some of the new features of Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, such as Flip 3D and the Ribbon. A big highlight was our demonstration of the monitors, which are able to rotate into a vertical position. At least 60 percent of our users have elected to keep their monitors in this position because it gives them more screen real estate for reading long documents. The public demonstration gave our users the opportunity to ask questions and let us present the timetable for rolling out the new systems, but the biggest benefit of the introduction was that it excited users and management and brought them on board with the Vista deployment.

User-assisted testing. Our users know their applications far better than we in IT do. For example, although the accounting package installed and ran fine, the IT staff doesn’t have the necessary permissions to perform many of the functions that the software offers. During the initial testing of the Vista WIM image, we invited users to spend some time doing their work in the IT department and tell us about any problems they encountered. By inviting users to work with their software on the machines they’d eventually have, we resolved several problems before the systems were put into production. User involvement brought to light many concerns that we were able to eliminate before deployment and made the whole project proceed more quickly and smoothly than it otherwise would have.

The Negatives
None of the problems we ran into were show-stoppers, but we certainly would have liked to have known about all of them ahead of time. Fortunately, we were able to successfully deal with all our negative experiences, albeit not always as quickly as we would have liked.

Discontinued equipment. Shortly after we ordered an initial batch of new machines, our supplier informed us that HP was discontinuing that model. The replacement had similar specifications but a different external appearance. We ordered as many of the original units as we could but were forced to switch to the other model for 20 percent of our deployment. As a result, users who received the discontinued model experienced computer envy, thinking that others were getting newer computers and that theirs was instantly junk, or at least outdated. No amount of explaining that the specifications were virtually identical allayed that feeling.

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