THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA

Hilarious that you say "holding back to watch the fallout" but yet you yourself are jumping on this not even service packed SBS 2008 version and was praising the tenets of Vista pre-SP1.

"Did you have a hard time learning Windows NT?  Did you hate moving to Windows 2000?  If that was a change you embraced, what has changed between then and now?"

The operating systems no longer were in beta.  Many of us do not want to be Microsoft's guinea pig.  We want stable environments.  We don't want to test for Microsoft.  We want fewer reboots (why I had to reboot for three random patches for Vista today, I'll fathom a guess that it had to do with Vista stability...)

SBS 2008 is not un-tested and not service packed. You'll not be a guinea pig. Think about it. SBS is a collection of previously released, service packed and updated applications. Someone else has already gone through the process for you. SBS 2008 is as rock solid as the unlying applications. As I stated during the presentation, it's not the applications that need to come up to speed, its us technicians.

Again, WHY switch to Vista?

XP works.  We have sufficient security software and organizational policies deployed to manage the client risk.

WHY pay more, in licensing and training and support?  What's the dollar ROI?  How is that avhieved?

We don't fear change.  We also don't embrace change simply for the sake of change.

Show me the return, and concvince me it's achievable, and then we can consider the investment.  Until our clients see a return, they should not and willl not make an expenditure.

j

I quietly read your blog for quite a while now, but please, this time, its too much blind MS advocacy here, really.

My real world experience is that Vista is ALWAYS slower than XP for the everyday tasks. Example: installing a new printer in our network. It takes 3 times longer on Vista than on XP. Who knows why. In general, getting things done on Vista ALWAYS takes longer, because of the breaks the system seems to take all the time for who-knows what reason. And then there's the workstation machine in our office, with Vista 64bit on it. It simply won't run stable, we had the mainboard, processor, memory and everything exchanged, installed from scratch, all the latest drivers, all the updates, but it keeps crashing at will. And its the machine my boss is using. The word for that is NIGHTMARE.

One observation that sums up how much thought went into the "logic" of the Vista design and how everything is "so much easier to access": look for the energy options. In a time where that buzzword "green IT" is on every street, there's no configuration option for the energy options. You have to know that they're hidden in the screensaver options, just like they always used to be. And nobody knows what hides behind the three default options in Vista. It can't really be just the screensaver and standby that is influenced by these options, its a lot more. But is it accessible anywhere? NO.

And Server 2008 and Exchange 2007? All the technical articles are full of cryptic commandline stuff you have to do to get things configured right. MS commandline parameters have never been very user friendly, but the powershell stuff is really driving me insane. Who can remember all that? Whats that about? Way back in time, the human-readable .ini files were moved into that thing called registry, and were only accessible "normally" through a GUI from then on - OK. And now they throw the GUI away and want us to fiddle around with the commandline to get things in the registry configured right? Whoah. More? Why did MS change the email user config path back to Exchange 5.5 style into the system manager? It simply breaks the approach at a unified place to set things up. If there are new features and new techniques, they should be accessible!

The year is 2008, and things should become EASIER, even for the *** admins from hell. But thats just not the case. Read the article how SBS2008's junkmail filters works and how they packed every technique into it - it simply gives me the creeps. This has nothing to do with exploration. This is insanity.

Every time I look at either Vista or Server 2008 I end up thinking "what, oh what have they done?!"

I build systems every day for a living, and every system ships with Vista x64 unless there is some kind of legacy software that doesn't run on it.  Most customers buy Software Assurance, so they can run Virtual PC for some of those legacy apps, or else they can run them on an SBS Premium server with downgrade licensing so as to run the app in Terminal Services.  Very few opt out of 64-bit versions, and XP isn't even an option anymore, since most business-class systems ship with 4GB (RAM is cheap, and I only sell quality systems).  Most Authorized Microsoft Distributors have XP on a long waiting list anyway, so the hassle of obtaining it isn't something that customers are waiting for.

I can tell you flat out that there are absolutely NO stability issues with Windows Vista x64, nor with Microsoft software running on it.  The only problems I've seen is with third-party hardware or software that isn't supported, of which, anything modern usually isn't part of that classification.  Most of those vendors don't care about the business outcome of the customers though, and they don't last long in the marketplace by not supporting new systems.  One particular kind of company are those business-class-document-imaging-companies-that-only-offer-support-through-resellers kind.  I recommend clients to stay away from those.  When a reseller closes up shop, your warranty is suddenly void, and another reseller is all too willing to service it - only for a very expensive consulting fee.  Luckily there are enough respectable companies out there to make up for the pathetic few.

I have seen numerous small PC builders close up shop around me though, because they don't learn how to build PC's properly.  Driver certification isn't part of their vocabulary, and they don't know the acronym WHQL.  Their loss, my gain.  Sales are actually up this month over last.

I'm also a Small Business Specialist, so my consulting practises merge into sales fairly easily.  I am literally a one-stop shop for small business IT.  (I also build and sell home PC's too)

By building my own systems, I know them inside and out.  I know the reliability of the components - I know, because I choose and test them myself.  I know how well they work with the software, and designing an IT infrastructure is a little more fine-grained in my shop, because I get right down to the component level when planning the platform.  It's a level of control that you can't really get by reselling OEM hardware.

I also don't preload any junkware, and custom-tailor the software loadout from day-one.  From top-to-bottom, I can design a complete IT SMB platform solution from the component level, all the way to end-user support.  So I do have a bit of understanding about SBS 2008, 2003, Vista, and XP, and how they all work on different computer hardware.