Five

-year wait for Vista was a good thing"> "We have been ringing the alarm bells about compatibility issues between our SAP applications and Vista over the past year as we tested them together, but all our issues were addressed by both companies and we are now confident that Vista and our SAP implementation will work seamlessly," he said.

TUV Nord has traditionally spent too much in administration and daily operations, and not enough in strategic operations to support company growth, Thaden said. But that is changing with the release of this new wave of products like Vista, Office 2007, Exchange 2007 and Windows Server "Longhorn," which is scheduled for the first half of next year, as well as others like Microsoft Operations Manager 2007. "The features found in MOM 2007 are exactly what we need. We have a lot of hard disk failures from the Windows 2000 and XP machines used by our engineers in the field. But we have now installed the MOM 2007 agent on these machines, which alerts them in advance of a possible hard disk failure," Thaden said. What is the real compatibility picture for Windows Vista? Click here to read more. "Also, there are features in Vista that let you see the health of each system and which identifies potential failures and issues. This functionality is critical for us as it lets us synchronize that data with our servers in advance of the failure," he said. For Thaden, the five years between the release of Windows XP and Vista was a good thing as it allowed the company to plan, roll-out and get good usage from that wave of products. "But many of my senior IT colleagues at other companies have been complaining about the fact that it has taken five years to get here," he said. The fact that Vista, Office 2007 and Longhorn Server were engineered to fit and work together was a positive for enterprises, given the high level of built-in integration between them, which reduced complexity and enhanced security, he said. MOM recently got a major face-lift. Click here to read more. For its part the U.S. Armys Advanced Technologies directorate in Fort Belvoir, Va., has already fully deployed Exchange 2007 in its environment, to about 7,000 mailboxes. The directorate is a test and research group within the Army. "This allows us to find out what problems may arise in the Army environment before the product gets deployed in the enterprise. The Army as a whole cannot deploy the product until at least Service Pack 1 due to some features that are required and which will not be added to the product until then," Brian Tirch, a senior engineer for the Advanced Technologies directorate, told eWEEK. Tirch added that he could not speculate on a given date at this time for deploying Exchange 2007 in the Army enterprise. Exchange 2007 brought good performance gains, while the move to 64-bit allowed the directorate to take advantage of increased memory, he said. To read more about how Exchange 2007 has something for all, click here. "Windows Power Shell is a great add on which will allow the scripting of many tasks and bridges the gap between Unix and Microsoft products. There is also increased security, with roll-based installation and default message encryption between servers," Tirch said. Next Page: Mixed reviews for Outlook 2007.