Windows 7 in the enterprise

I started deploying Windows 7 to one of my clients (a doctors office with 8 locations) last year on top of new HP business class PCs. Since then the support calls for desktop issues has dropped to almost zero. We had a networking problem with one of them which was probably hardware related. No viruses, no weird software errors, just Windows running smoothly. I don't have any crazy security policies and everyone is a local admin.

Is this similar to anyone else's experience?

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Comments

SteveLord

Same boat.

With my fairly small staff of 32, I run Windows 7 across 20 desktops / 20 laptops. And they've all admin rights to their machine. I've had almost no issues, other than "Where this is feature/button at in Windows 7/Office 2010?" type of questions. Combined with the new dual monitor, i7, 4GB setups helped contribute to less calls and improved efficiency.

N2IT

Some problems I have noticed so far

The scheduled sync sometimes doesn't sync when specified.
Network drives are not recognized / unmapped for some remote VPN users.
Some of our applications have just recently been set up to run on the 64 bit OS, they are running well though.
SCCM is still breaking even though WMI is part of the OS and not a add in. This has been less than with XP.
I have noticed Office applications hanging in task manager even after they are closed out. This has been extremely rare.

Other than that it's been running really smooth.

We are in an environment with over 10,000 users though.

Most of our end users do not have admin rights or power user rights.

brad-

Im slowly replacing about 100 XP desktops with W7x32 and 4GB ram. With one exception involving duplex printing from a crystal report, everything has been positive.

On the other hand, it makes more work for me since we redirected mydocuments to a file share with a group policy...and W7 doesnt do that. Its not a big deal though.

We have several legacy apps that installed and work just fine. I had to wait on a driver from a proprietary software company for one of our departments, but that was pretty quickly done. One I had to open wiht XPsp3 compatibility mode, but I love W7, and the users do as well.

forkvoid

I deployed Win7 at two environments... first was ~1500 machines, second was ~100. No admin rights on anyone, deployed via WDS for full automation. Support calls dropped to record lows. It's fantastic.

it_consultant

That's good feedback. I haven't been in a position to deploy desktops in groups of more than 5 to 10, so I have a pretty poor basis of comparison. I just noticed recently that if there is a print spooler problem, virus issue, etc, it is always with the XP clients. Besides the very momentary shock of the Windows 7 interface, I don't even get "How do I do this..." calls anymore.

I even leave UAC on to its default state. Partly because Citrix go to assist doesn't work quite right when UAC is off and partly because I wan't people to think twice before doing something stupid.

forkvoid

I actually gave Win7 to some of the most troublesome users as far as their ability to grasp concepts... told them "Think about where something *should* be, not where it *used* to be, and look there." Same goes for Office 2007/2010. I haven't had a single problem from them.

JDMurray

The file system search feature in Windows 7 Explorer sucks. I'm working on a scathing blog article on that very subject right now.

Otherwise, Win7 64-bit is astonishingly compatible with everything I've thrown at it thus far.

N2IT

JDMurray wrote: »

The file system search feature in Windows 7 Explorer sucks. I'm working on a scathing blog article on that very subject right now.

Otherwise, Win7 64-bit is astonishingly compatible with everything I've thrown at it thus far.

I don't care for it much either. Sometimes you can find something right away, but it is defiently kind of hokey.

Daniel333

We've had great results in the Vista/7 area since we started rolling them out. No real malware issues, application compatibility hasn't been a real issue. Where apps have been issues XenApp/RemoteApp to the rescue. A few older pieces of hardware, but nothing major. Mainly printers which stopped support in the XP era.

I couldn't be more impressed with Microsoft's handling of the x86 to x64 transition. They did an amazing job.

DirectAccess worked as advertised and so did BranchCache. BranchCache is part of our default deployment now.

Claymoore

brad- wrote: »

On the other hand, it makes more work for me since we redirected mydocuments to a file share with a group policy...and W7 doesnt do that. Its not a big deal though.

Windows 7 does support folder redirection and it gives you more options and more folders to redirect than you had in earlier versions:
Folder Redirection Overview

My clients have been in the 2,000 - 10,000 seat range, and across the thousands of PCs I encountered on various Win7 deployment projects, most of our problems are from compatibility with legacy applications. I have seen the range of problems from poorly or strangely written code to commercial software packages that are several revisions behind. Fortunately most of our clients are licensed for MDOP so we can use App-V and MED-V along with the usual shims and RDS to make the legacy code function in the new environment.

it_consultant

Does anyone use the 'Windows XP Compatibility Mode' feature?

Qord

The only issues we've had are printer related. W had a rash of odd printer crashes as soon as we moved clients to Windows 7 while keeping Server 2003 print servers. This has not happened on 7 clients whose print server is 2008 or 2008 R2.

Other than that, no complaints.

ODNation

I replaced 65 XP machines with Windows 7 Pro about 3 months ago... I've only run into one problem so far, and that was with some Pitney Bowes software. All I had to do was run the .NET clean-up utility and re-install .NET 3.5 and it worked like a champ. Other than that though, I have had ZERO problems with Windows 7

I hope in SP1, MS gives you the option to have the preview pane on the bottom and not just the right hand side. I like Windows Search (so far) over Google Desktop... plus I dont have GD hogging up my resources when WS can do just a good a job.

Claymoore

it_consultant wrote: »

Does anyone use the 'Windows XP Compatibility Mode' feature?

Yes, but I use the Application Compatibility Toolkit to tie the compatibility mode to a specific application and then deploy the compatibility database along with the application.

Compatibility Modes are collections of application compatibility shims, such as a version lie shim that lies to the application when it checks the OS version at launch. Compatibility Modes also apply to child processes spawned from the parent process which is pretty handy. The toolkit and the shims are easy to use once you fix a couple of applications and see how it works. There are lots of shims in the database, but most of the problems are common and you will probably only use 10 of the shims total.

darkerz

I just passed the 70-680, 685 and 686 in the last 56 days. I must say... Windows 7 is fantastic, but I'm afraid that because of how awesome... Guys like me who trained to support it are only good for one thing; migrations, backups and user training :P

Well played, Microsoft.

jtoast

Claymoore wrote: »

My clients have been in the 2,000 - 10,000 seat range, and across the thousands of PCs I encountered on various Win7 deployment projects, most of our problems are from compatibility with legacy applications.

Application rationalization is almost always a huge issue. Not only do you have to make sure that the applications themselves are compatible, you may have to repackage them to recognize the new OS. That becomes a huge issue when there are thousands of applications involved.

N2IT

it_consultant wrote: »

Does anyone use the 'Windows XP Compatibility Mode' feature?

I've used it before when referring back to XP and I had to install an application on it before to get it to work, before we released the new package into the environment.