14 DAY TRIAL // To me, it’s hard to believe that this long after the release of Windows 7 there are customers shrugging off Windows Next.
And it is almost inconceivable to have exponents of the “wait for SP1 before upgrading” crowd not interested in the least in the first upgrade for Windows 7.
I had the chance to chat with a number of Microsoft customers that have made the jump to Windows Vista’s successor, or are far along into the migration process.
While Windows 7 adopters are bound to be quite common judging by the 240 million licenses Microsoft sold since October 22nd, 2009, according to a count did a few months ago, the customers I talked to are not your average users.
I managed to get insight into Windows 7 adoption from Allen Matkins, Pella Windows, Varian Medical, and National Instruments.
It was rather clear to me that end users had already embraced the latest Windows client, after all I’m seeing examples every day. But I wanted to know whether consumers had any say in terms of corporate OS upgrade strategies.
Consumerization is the term used to describe the connection between the consumer market and enterprise infrastructures. Since I came across views disputing Microsoft’s consumer brand power last year, I welcomed the opportunity to get some feedback directly from some of the company’s enterprise customers.
Windows 7 is a victory on the enterprise front for Microsoft
Clients such as Allen Matkins, Pella Windows, Varian Medical, and National Instruments, prove that the success enjoyed by Windows 7 on the consumer market reverberates across corporate environments.
Although the company refused to share any numbers reflecting the corporate uptake of the latest iteration of the Windows client - no real surprise there, they still haven’t shared any figures for Vista - it’s clear to me from talking directly to customers that Windows 7 is a victory on the enterprise front for Microsoft.
“Windows 7 was pretty much everything that we were hoping to get from Windows Vista,” Frank Gillman, chief technology officer for Allen Matkins, tells me. “But done much more successfully, ready for market, and really able to deliver on some of the promises [from Microsoft].”
Allen Matkins is a California-based law firm that has made the jump to Windows 7 for over a year, being one of the earliest adopters of the platform. As the rest of the customers featured in this article, they dodged Vista altogether, so their desktops had fallen behind.
Being an early adopter certainly has its advantages, with the software giant lending a helping hand with the deployment.
“I’ll be honest with you. I’ve seen plenty of releases in OSes, and suffered through some of Microsoft’s earlier missteps, and there have been more than one over the years. We were shocked at how well Windows 7 worked, pretty much right with the release client, how much things did what they were supposed to do, how few problems we’ve had,” Gillman notes.
Some applications that Allen Matkins employees relied on had features incompatible with the new OS, there were also some policy issues, especially around email retention policies. It fell on the IT department to resolve them, and they did, including turning to virtualization for some incompatibility issues.
Gillman says that he has never seen a Microsoft product be as effective as Windows 7, or required so little of him in terms of problem solving and tech support. He welcomes its success, noting that the Redmond company really needed to restore corporate trust after duds such as Windows Vista and Windows Me.
“From a durability standpoint, from an operational standpoint, from a functional standpoint, I have to say that if you had have told me Windows 7 would have done what it’s done, and been as reliable as it is, I would have been shocked. I would have never expected it to be that good,” Gillman reveals, and there’s still a tone of surprise in his voice.
“It just worked! As hard as it is to believe, it just worked. It’s been a very pleasant surprise,” he adds.
Varian Medical is another company that saw no point in waiting for Service Pack 1. Leveraging their Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, the company went ahead and deployed Windows 7 Enterprise using the 64-bit version as the standard.
“We currently have 4,100 systems migrated to Windows 7. This is 60% of our user base. We started testing over a year ago and saw no reason to wait for SP1. Win 7 is a polished, complete product. Now that we have this many deployed employees are indeed asking for Windows 7,” Steven Henderson, program manager and desk side support manager for North America, explains.
Employees going to the IT department and asking for Windows 7, all the IT guys I interviewed treated this as somewhat of a novelty, which of course indirectly speaks rather loudly about their past experiences with Windows.
Speaking of which, how about having employees not even ask for Windows 7, but actually make the decision themselves?
This was the case at National Instruments, as Jay Garing, Global Service Desk manager, reveals. Over 2,200 of NI systems are already running Windows 7 out of the approximately 7,000 desktops in total. NI also has an Enterprise agreement with Microsoft and even Software Assurance for the desktop Windows.
Garing notes that the IT realized early on that Windows 7 was going to be extremely popular, so they went along and started making preparations to ensure that the company was ready for the OS.
“The first priorities were not 'are we going to go to Windows 7 or not?' That decision had actually already been made. We knew that all of our users would want to go to Windows 7. They were going to expect that it was going to work with our core software, so it really wasn’t IT’s decision to do it or not. We knew it was going to happen,” Garing explains.
NI has a highly technical user base, with only a third of the company having a traditional relationship with the IT department. These are the only people for which IT needed to sit in the driver’s seat for the Windows 7 upgrade. And then there are those with direct MSDN access that can grab any Microsoft product they want.
“The majority of the company are R&D folks, sales folks, and are support engineers that offer support to customers buying our products. And all of the categories of users are quite technical. They don’t need any help at all from central IT to upgrade their desktop operating system if they want to. After all, the folks are writing device drivers for a living,” he explains.
The IT team of Pella Windows said that they would love to test drive Windows 7 back in late 2008, says Jim Thomas, the company’s director of IT operations. Another Windows 7 early adopter, Pella Windows has slowed down the adoption rate as it needed to adapt to the economic reality of the US housing market, but still managed to deploy in excess of 1,500 seats.
“And the number of PCs that we’re rolling through and replacing has also slowed down. We’re still on target. Our expectation is we’ll approach – our original target was 4,500 PCs by the end of 2011,” Thomas says.
“I will say that right now we’re probably be a little short of that number, but our expectation is that we’ll probably be going to be up to 4,000 by the end of 2011. Windows 7 will be the dominant operating system in our environment by the end of 2011.”
One advantage of having an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft is that there are no additional licensing costs for Windows 7, or any other products covered in the ECAL.
For Pella, the costs of migrating to Windows 7 were represented exclusively by the time and effort it took the IT department to get the company through the migration process.
“We ran [the XP] environment for a very long time and it served us very well. But we tried to stay relatively current. We actually opted not to go to Vista. In general, we stay very current on our technologies. Seldom do we skip, and we don’t always need to be out on the leading edge, but the goal for us is ‘I pay for support, I’m entitled to the new features and capabilities,’ so it’s a lot easier if you stay on a regular drum beat, doing upgrades and staying current,” Thomas explains.
Pella Windows is an illustrative example of the consumerization of IT. As it was the case with other companies covered here, the employees were ready to embrace Windows 7 even ahead of the IT department actually deploying the platform.
“We originally let users poll the operating system. Once we got started and had some internal interest, we had users asking us, and there’s a handful that hadn’t thought much about it, and we wanted to go visit them, but for the most part we’ve deployed Windows 7 either with new machines or with users that have come forward and said ‘I’ve seen this, I need this. Put this on my machine.’ For use that’s a little different than some of our applications in the past where we’ve pushed it. This has been a bit of a user call,” Thomas adds.
System Center is an enterprise customer’s best friend
Allen Matkins’ IT department came up with a rather creative approach to helping employees get through the transition to a new operating system. '007 License to Thrill' was a program designed to train non-technical users that were making the jump to Windows 7 and Office 2007.
“We used some creativity to market Windows 7 to employees. People are entertainment driven, and especially with the 007 thing, we created a trailer with scenes from some of the James Bond films,” Gillman reveals.
“We put our managing partner into it via green screen, and produced a trailer that said ‘You don’t have to be afraid of the upgrade. It’s a license to thrill.’ We also made a movie poster that matched it, and gave out tickets, and when people came into the training they got popcorn, lickerish. We made the whole thing like it was a premier event for the firm.”
And people responded positively to the initiative which focused on marketing the concept that Windows 7 would allow them to be more effective. As a direct result, users that were inherently resistant to change became more flexible in relation to the new technologies being deployed in their environment.
“Windows 7, to some degree, conforms to user work habits and work patterns successfully, and makes it more efficiently, because it has more flexibility, more viability, and therefore whether you take the time to learn anything or not is up to you. Ultimately this operating system is going to make your life better,” Gillman says.
But as far as deployment goes, Allen Matkins used System Center Configuration Manager, and they’re by no means alone in doing so.
SCCM and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) were the tools of choice for Varian Medical.
“We chose to deploy a fresh software image rather than an upgrade. The time to deploy was longer due to the image size as our previous image was XP based. We also spent a considerable amount of time qualifying our application base,” Henderson states.
“We are using Microsoft SCCM and Microsoft’s MDT tool for deployment and management of our endpoints. Integration and full functionality with all our applications are vitally important.”
Pella Windows’ Thomas cites streamlined management of OS images as one of the reasons why the company made the jump to Windows 7.
“With Windows XP we had a unique image that we had to maintain for every version of a PC that we had on our standards list. We were maintaining numerous images, about 4, and we needed to find custom drivers for each model,” he notes.
“Windows 7 has given us a lot more flexibility. In the past it would have cost a lot of time to deploy an image, and because we couldn’t keep it current we had a lot of upgrades we needed to deploy by SCSM (Microsoft System Center: Service Manager) before the PC was ready. So it took a lot of time to set up a PC.”
Thomas also reveals that the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) was heavily utilized, and that the number of machines he had to migrate himself was close to zero.
However, the IT department decided to keep clear of virtualization as a solution to resolve issues to avoid what he calls future legacies, pointing out that App-V is regarded as a last resort only.
“Fortunately we haven’t had a lot of troubles, although there’s been some,” Garing from NI says. “Our focus was on how we can make this more efficient for everyone, and that’s where operating system distribution elements of Config Manager came in. We didn’t want to have everybody to have to install it by hand if they didn’t want to.”
NI leverages SCCM to set up, roll out and manage Windows 7 machines, but they did not find MDOP to be as useful.
“We did look at App-V in detail, it’s an interesting solution. But I’m not sure we have the kind of problems here in our environment that MDOP and particularly APP-V is targeted at solving. So it felt to us like a solution looking for a problem,” Garing explains.
When I asked him whether employees came to the IT department saying they wanted Windows 7, he said “This definitely happened to us. We had a huge interest in our employee base that wanted Windows 7.”
94% satisfaction rate Microsoft revealed on more than one occasion that Windows 7 had a 94% satisfaction rate, so of course I jumped at the chance to see whether this was true in corporate environments.
It turns out that the IT professionals I’ve talked to are all confirming that indeed employees are extremely happy with the new operating system.
“I have 1,500 users, I’ve had 0 wanna-go-backwards, I’ve had a couple that struggled, but for me to think that I’m north of 90% users satisfied, I can easily say that’s a true statement,” Pella’s Thomas reveals adding that the company did early surveys when just about 700 seats had been deployed, and found that over 95% were satisfied and very satisfied. “It’s been very positive,” he admits.
“We’ve been very satisfied with the quality of Windows 7.” Thomas indicates that SP1 has been in no way critical to the decision to upgrade to Windows 7, although it’s on the near horizon, “We’ve deployed [Windows 7] to all levels of our organization and it’s been solid.”
At National Instruments, employees migrated to Windows 7 are happy with the new operating system.
“People like that it looks good. The Aero interface is really slick. The majority of our employees were on XP prior to this. (…) Overall I think our employees like it quite a bit,” Garing from NI says.
“The R&D employees were really excited when they got it installed and realized the number of the basic performance gains with Windows 7. And we’re talking the simple knots and bolts things. It boots faster, it shuts down faster, etc. a lot of the things that our engineers were interested in, given what our products are. If you’re using your basic desktop as your scientific instrument, speed, reliability, performance, are all very important. So they quickly became excited about how Windows 7 was working on their desktop and they were installing it already,” he adds.
Thomas from Pella Windows notes that for the IT department silence equals praise. According to him, what people are actually saying by not calling, by not complaining is that the technology implemented works for them.
“In a year, none of the complaints have been about Windows 7. Almost all of them have been about a feature in an application that wasn’t available to them or about email. We really struggled with email management. We also had some early problems with some obscure printing driver,” Thomas explains.
“Satisfaction with Win 7 is quite high. The majority of any issues we have had in fact were due to Internet Explorer 8. Hopefully IE 9 when released will overcome these issues and continue to build on the improvements made by Windows 7,” Henderson from Varian Medical agrees.
Getting answers without asking any questions
On each of the interviews I did, I made a point not to ask about any favorite features in Windows 7. This was intentional, because I often find that people will do the best they can to answer questions, while making the answer less relevant in the context in which they feel they have to respond.
Instead, I waited for the IT pros I chatted with to tell me on their own whether or not they had any preferred feature. It might not be the most orthodox of techniques, but I guess it worked, since they did.
BitLocker was a big deal for Pella Windows, for example. The encryption technology built by default into the Enterprise SKU of Windows 7 helped them replace a third-party product that the company was relying on for its cryptographic needs.
But there are additional features that Pella employees liked, from stability to elements of the graphical user interface.
“Windows 7 has been rock solid for us.” The user features, snipping tool, aero glass, users have adopted and learned pretty well, and they like it. And clearly the ability to pin and unpin programs and some of the other programs,” Thomas reveals.
In fact, because of the advances done to the GUI in Windows 7, Pella Windows support staff were able to better their workflow, resulting in an increase in productivity by taking advantage of elements as simple as window management.
Garing from NI does acknowledge that they ran into some issues, especially related to solutions running on top of Windows rather than the platform itself.
“Overall, Windows 7 was quite smooth, smoother than past operating systems. But this doesn’t mean it was perfect. We still had some problems. They were mainly related to software and the Lotus notes client. Some of the early versions didn’t work exactly right. There were occasional situations when it would crash. We also have an Enterprise agreement with IBM,” he stated.
Praises also go to the performance and stability of Windows 7, as well as the evolution in terms of streamlined management.
In the end, the IT pros that I talked to all confirm that the Total Cost of Ownership is down compared to older releases of Windows, but in this regard, the actual cost savings are different for each company in part, and not all of them had figures ready to share with the public.
However, it will be easy to see for IT admins that they will save both time and money for a variety of tasks from imaging the OS, to managing the images, to deploying it, and to administering the environment, including money saved from the IT department not having to resolve issues for employees. Pella’s Thomas reveals that it takes only 70% of the effort to support XP in order to support Windows 7.
The conclusion? Windows 7 is that good that businesses should upgrade to keep their employees happy.