Month: October 2009

I was at one of the local Harvey Norman’s on Windows 7 launch day.  MS Ireland had staff at many of their outlets to help with the launch.  I was chatting with one of the guys and looked at the pricing.  The RRP of Windows 7 Ultimate off the shelf is only 10-20 Euros (is that around $1,000 now? 😉 ) more than Windows 7 Professional.  Hmm, small and medium businesses who normally use OEM licensing for the desktop might want to spend that extra few Euros to get the “better together” features such as BranchCache, DirectAccess, and Federated Search, not to mention BitLocker and BitLocker to Go.

Amazon has announced that a beta for “Kindle for PC” will start in November. It will have support for touch on Windows 7.  For example, if your laptop or PC has a touch screen you can do things like “turn” the page with your finger.  How cool is that?

I can see myself signing up so I can get books cheaper.  I certainly advise anyone doing this to sort out their desktop/laptop backups.

As of today both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are available to everyone and everywhere (with obvious international limitations where MS are not allowed to sell).  For example, Harvey Norman is a chain of stores that sell furniture and electronics in Ireland.  Yesterday I got an A3 sized glossy flyer through the door advertising Windows 7 and pre-loaded OEM PC’s being on sale from today onwards.

I think MS learned a lot from the Vista days.  You even hear them publicly admitting that mistakes were made with Vista.  Personally I think they communicated badly.  It appeared to me back then that they were pitching Vista at the home user.  All I heard for the most part was how pretty it was and how easy it was to burn photos to a DVD.  Who cares!?!?! The business generally wants to disable DVD burning.  MS failed to market the business functionality of Vista.  I think they failed very badly at working with the OEM’s.  PC’s were sold as “Vista Capable” that barely ran the OS.  Lots of existing hardware had no drivers.  I’d just bought a set of wifi cards before the Vista release that had no support.

Windows 7 has been very different.

Locally, we saw a huge effort by MS.  In the Spring we had the TechDays tour which I spoke at.  At night Wilbour Craddock did a session on IT at home.  I worked with a number of other speakers in the day events to talk about Windows 7 working “better together” with Windows Server 2008 R2 and many of the new features.  In the summer MS ran a series of Windows 7 only events around the island.  We’ve just wrapped up the community launch tour.  Again Will did the IT at home session.  In the day we ran a session featuring some of the developers.  Myself, Will and Dave Northey talked about Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.  I focused on MAP (Assessment and Planning), application compatibility (ACT and XP Mode), and deployment (WDS but mainly MDT 2010).  There was even a special all day deployment event in Ennis.

Heck, MS Ireland are even going to have representatives in selected retail outlets today to talk about Windows 7.  They are taking it very seriously.

Corporate also did a better job communicating with home and professional customers starting back in November 2008.  The beta and RC programs were HUGE.  We saw the result of that at the launch events: over 75% of attendees were already using Windows 7.  There’s a genuine appetite for it and interest in it.

On the driver side I’ve experienced some happiness.  Those wifi NIC’s that sat unused have a driver supplied in the Windows 7 DVD.  I’ve heard similar stories from others.  MS really did work with the OEM’s.  Certain rootkit spreading OEM’s (you know who I mean) continue to be uncooperative, though, when it comes to XP Mode/Windows Virtual PC support.

The Windows User Group will continue this work.  I’m planning a deployment session that will be demo, demo, demo.  I want to do everything from scratch so people see how to use WAIK, WDS and MDT for themselves.

I’m going into a retail outlet today.  I’m feeling evil and want to have some fun 🙂

Microsoft released XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC for download just a few minutes ago.  Windows Virtual PC is a freebie.  XP Mode is free to everyone running Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise editions.

Windows Virtual PC is a PC-based virtualisation solution aimed directly at application compatibility solutions.  XP Mode gives you a Windows XP SP3 operating system that you can run those applications on.  The idea here is that you run your non-Windows 7 compatible applications into the XP Mode VM.  If the shortcuts are in the “All Users” profile in the XP Mode VM then they appear on the Start Menu on your Windows 7 OS.  Now, when you run the XP Mode applications from Windows 7 the XP Mode VM is started up behind the scenes.  You get an RDP session into the VM and your application runs in a seamless window.  You can copy, paste, use USB devices, etc.  The XP Mode VM is a computer.  It is its own security boundary.  It needs to be managed just like a physical computer so that means anti-malware, software deployment, patching, etc.

XP Mode really is the last step in the application compatibility ladder.  Test your apps on Windows 7 and those you find are incompatible are dealt with in this order:

1. Replace the application: If you can afford to do this and the vendor is still around this is the ideal solution.  It’s easier and cheaper (self service) than ever to self certify an application so you can legally use the Windows 7 logo.
2. If the application is home grown then have it modified.
3. Use the Application Compatibility Toolkit:  ACT 5.5 allows you to shim/mitigate (aka trick) the application to think it’s running on a legacy operating system and deal with system calls similar to those legacy operating systems.  You create a shim either as an MSI or a SDB file depending on the tool used.  MSI’s can be deployed as pre-requisites packages for your legacy applications.  SDB files can be deployed using SDBINSTALL.EXE which is found in C:WindowsSystem32 on Windows 7 computers.  You can use startup scripts, GPO or software deployment services (e.g. Configuration Manager 2007/2007 R2) to deploy these MSI or SDB shims.
4. Use virtualisation: XP Mode is great for the small/medium business.  But larger businesses will want to look at MED-V if they have desktop software assurance and can afford the additional purchase of MDOP (Desktop Optimisation Pack).  MED-V is a centrally managed virtualisation solution allowing easier change control.
5. Look at legacy Terminal Services solutions for running those applications.

Ideally, you get yourself to a point where you can run an application that is certified for Windows 7 without using shims, MED-V or XP Mode.

Michael Niestrom posted a handy tip for a problem I was looking at.  The problem?

When the Lite Touch deployment is complete it:

• Leaves the PC logged in as a local administrator: The idea is that this is a light touch deployment.  We kick it off and walk away.  You can’t reasonably do that if you leave 10’s or 100’s of PC’s in the building all logged in as a local administrator.
• A splash screen is left up on screen when the task sequence completes.

Michael suggests that:

• You add a command-line based step to shutdown/restart the PC as the last step in the task sequence.
• You disabled the summary screen with SkipFinalSummary in the CustomSettings.ini (aka deployment share rules).

Thanks for the tips Michael!