The inevitable did happen. Late last year we had a student enter the laptop program with a laptop with Windows Vista on it. Needless to say we were unprepared for it but we could not make the student turn around the ask the retailer to downgrade their laptop to Windows XP as this would be reoccurring theme in the near future not to mention we pride ourselves in being a technically proficient College. Willing to accept the challenge we took this opportunity to see how our current setup of software, configurations and policies worked in a Vista environment.
First of the rank, our set of software on the client performed near flawlessly, nothing in Vista prevented any of our application suite from functioning typically. Aside from a few issues of license issues where application installed and configure on a local account did carry over its settings to any new account created on the laptop (namely our domain accounts); nothing could of not gone more smoothly.
The only major software issue we came across was Ghost 8.0′s reluctance to successfully clone a HDD with Windows Vista installed on it. This was due to Windows Vistas GUID Partition Table system which replaces the Master File Table used in previous version of Windows. A simple (HA!) upgrade to the latest Ghost removed this issue.
Our configurations on the other hand were no so lucky. Machine-based Wireless Certificates did not work the same way they did in Windows XP (which required a Registry hack to work anyway) and forced us to use User-based Wireless Certificates which was quite painful as this meant the wireless connection did not connect until a User had successfully logged into the laptop which in turn meant no logon scripts would run. It was not until the middle of semester 1 until someone in another school figured out the inner workings of Vista’s Wireless and the new Network & Sharing Center and thus enabling Machine-based Wireless Certificates.
To work around this issue we provided teachers of Year 7 classes documentation on navigating to the Network Shares via UNC paths (as there wireless worked, just not quick enough for logon scripts).
Our policies took an even worse beating. Printers deployed via Group Policy seemed sporadic at best, sometimes all the printers showed up, sometimes none with no ability to add them via the Add Printers function in Windows. Eventually Service Pack 1 cleared this problem right up. Luckily this issue only seemed to effect 1 Lab of computer in the Library. What was different about those particular ones in comparison to other labs and our latest laptop roll out is quite bemusing.
Some users network shares were also affected by Vista. Instead of being d:\Student\ExitYear\Usernameon the Fileserver Vista would rename their folder so it looked like d:\Student\ExitYear\Documents. Luckily the network share name was unaffected and users could continue to access their share, so it was more an administration issue particularly when we wanted to go through student folders. This problem is documented well by Microsoft and unfortunately the problem will not go away till there are no Windows XP machines accessing the shares.
So in the end the laptop was quite helpful in finding out little quirks and familiarizing ourselves with Microsoft’s new operating system. But to get ready for mass deployment on our desktops we needed to evaluate our current range of desktops and see if they are capable of running Vista to our standard. In comes Microsoft’s Windows Vista Hardware Assessment Tool, a handy little application I discovered in my Windows Vista Client for Enterprise Support Technicians Training Kit. This application ‘is an inventory, assessment, and reporting tool that will find computers on a network and determine if they are ready to run the Windows Vista™ operating system or the 2007 Microsoft Office System’. In running this tool we discovered the majority of our current PCs would not handle Windows Vista to our standard, most could only just handle the Basic aspects of Vista and we did not want the students experience of Vista to be a painful one so with this information as ammunition we planned with our ICT Coordinator to upgrade our Library Labs hardware to specifications capable of running Vista. The Lab adjacent to the IT Support office would also be upgraded because the Hardware was very new and passed the WVHA Tool comfortably.
We scheduled 3 days for deployment of the new hardware in the Library and successfully deployed the new hardware with Windows Vista and Office 2007.
The next step was to monitor the new lab and gain feedback from Students and Staff. Although we are still continuing to do so the only change we made apart from deploying Service Pack 1 to remove the teething issues (see above) was utilizing the Microsoft provided ADM files in Group Policy to force all the Office packages to save by default in the 2000-2003 File Format to prevent students not being able to access their work that was saved on the new Library lab on computers that do not have Office 2007, namely other labs, their home computers and their teachers laptops.
Generally the method is to Plan>Test/Evaluate>Deploy>Monitor/Gain Feedback but in this case we evaluated the software before we planned to the deployment but I guess you have to be flexible and work with the situation at hand.
Good Work James. Well written as always. Keep it coming…