To+Vista+or+not+to+Vista

In this session we discussed whether or not we should move to vista or wait until all the issues are resolved. There was a consensus that we should wait for now if we are doing wide scale deployment Ryan Young – from The Masters School rolled back to xp after having many problems with vista. Some of the issues were: Groups Policy, uac issues problems Printer issues. Blackbuad issue: Does not update consistently on vista machines Current crop of software have incompatibilities

Windows server 2008 beta does work better with Vista.

Vista can be used in some cases were legacy software was not an issue. Should turn of UAC to make it easier to deal with.

We also discussed if we should have the same computing platform as the students. Since they are starting to buy Vista and Office 2007 at home do we need to be on par with that. One should understand that using Vista at home and deploying it in an enterprise is very different.

Many school were using Ghost, either the old versions or the new symantec ghost solution 2.0. Licensing is relatively inexpensive.
 * We also talked about imaging Software and tools**

Other imaging software or tools being used were Wds and imagex from Microsoft. Sysprep and Ghost enabled creating universal imaging that works across different hardware models.

Binary research universal.net image utility was another imaging software mentioned Vista has a limit of 3 syspep allowed, after that it locks the system. Vista activation kms and mac issue was discussed. drivexml - anyone remember what that was? Office 2003 and 2007 was talked about and whether we should move to 2007. The ribbon interface is good but there is a short learning curve. Lenova had issues with vista. Turn off UAC helped Dellprep was discussed

Other issues Are faculty allowed to install apps on school computers? Jonathan King from Riverdale does not allow faculty to install anything. Systems are locked down. Linda Improta from Trinity-Pawling School also does not allow facutly to install anything on school computer - locked down tight

Other imaging software Trueimage. Pxe